The concept of Black Hole in Rig Veda

What is a Black Hole ? Meaning given by science is :: region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape. Meaning given by Rishis :: The celestial object that has a gravitational field so strong that light cannot escape it and that is believed to be created especially in the collapse of a very massive star. This means that God Shiva is ahead of time and space, since you can't restrict Mahadev to a confined time and space. Mahadev is the creator of them.?

At the time of dissolution, the entire Universe and the black holes too get dissolved into Mahadev and again new evolution or creation would start from Shiva. Black holes and Dark Matter are scientific postulates to explain certain mysterious cosmological phenomena. So no, there is no mention of them specifically, but the Upanishad (Subala 2:4) does say that at the time of the Big Crunch (pralaya) all matter merges into Tamas (darkness) before being reabsorbed into the Brahman (totality of Being). likewise re-emergence of the Universe arises from Tamas.?

Shrimad Bhagwat gives complete details of the various Lokas of the galaxy giving precise locations of the various divine and semi-divine denizens of our Galaxy! The Galactic Center, is the tail-end of the coiled serpent and is supposed to be a seat of Immense Power and Energy. According to the Bhagwat, this Galactic Center is formed by the Dhruva Loka. Sayana, a fourteenth century mathematician and teacher in Vijayanagara court, commenting on Rigveda, Book one, hymn 50, has described what appears to be the speed of light. He quotes sunlight travelling 2202 yojanas in half a “nimisha.” Taking each Yojana to be about 9 miles long and a nimisha is about 16/75th of a second; it works out to around 185794 miles per second.?

That is a very close approximation of the speed of light. He was writing in the fourteenth century AD about a Vedic composition probably dating back to 3000 BCE. Our sun is an average sized star about half way down its life cycle. In about five billion years from now, the fuel in the sun will burn out, leaving a cold, dark mass the size of a few miles across, smaller than the size of earth. A star, which is ten times the size of our sun, will have burnt up its fuel in time and collapse on itself into a neutrino star. A neutrino star has massive gravitational pull. If you drop a marshmallow on such a neutrino star, it will produce a force equivalent to a nuclear bomb.?

However, a star, which is twenty times the size of our sun, will collapse into a black hole with unimaginable gravitational pull. Almost every galaxy in our universe has a black hole in its centre. They are voracious eaters and swallow anything that comes close. Some of them are vast, measuring thousands of light years across with a mass equivalent to millions of suns and some of them are miniscule rogue Black Holes wandering the interstellar space. Despite their reputation of swallowing everything in their path, they do not really go chasing after objects.?

Ancient Hindu astronomy speaks of stars, other heavenly bodies disappearing, and a star devouring another star. At a crude level, one could think of Rahu swallowing the sun causing the solar eclipse. Ancient scriptures tell us about stars swallowing other stars. It has been described as a bottomless pit into which everything disappears. However, they do have a bottom where the star has condensed into a tiniest mass. Even though the size is tiny, the mass remains the same. For example, when our sun collapses into a dark mass the size of a few miles across, our earth will stay in the same place with the same gravitational pull of the sun. If we set off from the earth in a spacecraft and travel about 26000 light years towards the centre of our Milky Way galaxy we will reach the constellation of Sagittarius.

There is an area within the constellation where nothing can be seen. This has been termed Sag A*. As we reach the edge of this area, the time slows down enormously. Every minute spent in this zone called the ‘event horizon’ is equal to about a thousand years on earth. If you manage to cross the ‘Event horizon’ the time stops for you. In Hindu mythology, Brahma, the creator of the universe said to have a life span of billions of years and his one day is equal to thousands of earth years. Is it possible that the author of this hymn was indicating the event horizon and issues with the time space continuum??

Mandukya Upanishad describes the day of creator as 4.5 billion years of human time as day the same as night. If we remember the big bang occurred around 13.8 billion years ago and the stars were formed around 9 million years ago, it seems a bit more than coincidence that these numbers match. Black holes do not just exist in the centre of galaxies, but there are rogue ones wandering around the galaxies devouring anything that came in their path. Our own galaxy has at least half a dozen such rogue black holes. What do these black holes have? In a word, a lot of nothing. That is not entirely true. Anything that gets into the clutches of its gravitational pull gets compacted into small objects.?

A regular sized black hole can compact a mountain the size of Mount Everest to the size of a grain of sand or less. Our own home planet can be compacted to the size of an eyeball. Supermassive black holes are another matter altogether. They would reduce our home planet to atomic size or less. They have masses equivalent to millions or even billions of suns. Once anything reaches the centre of the Black Hole it will come to the region of ‘Singularity’ and all objects merge into this ‘Singularity’. We know that the big bang started with the ultimate example of Singularity – a tiny speck 13.8 billion years ago and it is still expanding.?

Coming to the region of ‘Event horizon’ or the point of no return. When and if you manage to reach the area just before ‘Event horizon’ area, every minute spent there is equal to thousand years at home on earth. If you manage to cross the event horizon, someone looking from earth will see you frozen in time. However, nothing is infinite. Stephen Hawking theorises that there is a “leak” from the black holes at an infinitesimal slow rate. You will have to wait a trillion or two earth years before you can escape. As you fall through the black hole, you are stretched and shred to pieces and as you reach the centre, you become one with the black hole.?

You have reached “Singularity”. This begs the question or several questions. Did the ancient Indians know about the black holes and the Event horizon five thousand years ago? Did they know that the time moves slower nearer the centre of gravity than, say a global positioning satellite (GPS)? Did they know that a minute near the event horizon is equal to thousands of earth years? When they quoted the creator’s time as millions or billions of years, were they being metaphorical? When one becomes one with the Black Hole in ‘Singularity’, is one merging with the Creator, as Hindu’s believe? Om Namah Shivay