It may look like an out of focus picture of a luminous glazed donut, but it is actually the first successfully obtained image of a black hole, larger than our own solar system. The sound you’re about to hear after what I say next is the collective groaning despair of astronomers: How do we understand this astrologically?

I ask because surely we can’t ascribe astrological planetary characteristics to another astronomical event/celestial body. Instead, a black hole would have to have its own astrological nature just as the Sun, Moon and planets do. I don’t claim to know exactly what it would or should be like, but I do think there is a way to understand the topic of black holes in some sort of astrological context.

The Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, as scientists suspect most galaxies do. From our perspective, our local black hole is located at the longitudinal degree of 26 Sagittarius. Interestingly, it seems our understanding of these bodies is tied to transits that approach this degree.

Karl Schwarzschild was the first to solve Einstein’s field equations with exact answers, which essentially describe properties of a black hole. He did this while he was fighting in World War I! He sent a letter to Einstein describing his solutions on December 22nd 1915. He concluded the letter by saying “As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of the heavy gunfire, to allow me to get away from it all and take this walk in the land of your ideas.” Karl Schwarzschild was born with Mars at 27 Sagittarius, and the transiting Sun that day was at 29 Sagittarius, mere days after an exterior Sun-Mercury conjunction at 26 Sagittarius, in the vicinity of our own galaxy’s black hole.

And while that could be dismissed as kind of a cute coincidence, it continues.

David Finkelstein made the next breakthrough in black hole physics by identifying the Schwarzschild radius as the event horizon of what they called a “dark star”. David Finkelstein was born on July 19th 1929, when Saturn was at 25 Sagittarius. He published his first paper on black holes on May 15th 1958 at his Saturn Return, just 1 longitudinal degree from our own galaxy’s black hole.

Carl Sagan re-popularized black holes with his phenomenally popular “Cosmos” PBS show, which premiered on September 28th 1980, when Neptune was at 20 Sagittarius, inching its way towards the longitudinal degree of our own galaxy’s black hole. A few years later in 1988, Stephen Hawking published his book “A Brief History Of Time” which again re-popularized exotic astronomical phenomena such as black holes. In this year, Saturn and Uranus were located between 24 Sagittarius-1 Capricorn, crossing over the longitudinal degree of our own galaxy’s black hole.

So what do we make of this current news that we have achieved the first successful image of a black hole? Well the Event Horizon Telescope which captured this image was not just one telescope, but a global array of telescopes specifically designed to produce an image of a black hole. This project began on an unknown date in 2006, a year when Pluto was located between 24-26 Sagittarius, right in the vicinity of our own galaxy’s black hole. And now that the image has actually been released today on April 10th 2019, we see that Jupiter is at 24 Sagittarius, just 2 longitudinal degrees from our own galaxy’s black hole.

So I think a good case can be made for the importance of our own local black hole at 26 Sagittarius for the topic of black holes in general. So if you see someone trying to link this news to the Saturn-Pluto conjunction or something, maybe send them this!