Deep in the Core 209
meehawl writes "A video of what is currently thought to be the closest star to the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The star orbits the black hole in a highly elliptical orbit with a period of 15 years or so, but at its closest approach it swings within 17 light hours of the black hole (around three times the distance between the Sun and Pluto). In the video, you can see the star ricochet past its closest approach to the black hole. This slingshot effect enabled astronomers to further pinpoint the mass of the black hole, which is confidently estimated at 2 million suns or so. The mass observation, coupled with the size constraints observed, indicates the object at the centre of the galaxy is definitely composed of some exotically dense form of matter."
UPDATE (Score:5, Funny)
Circling the drain (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Circling the drain (Score:2)
Maybe it reflects the underlying structure of the universe, or maybe it's just that things spin when gravity or mass become even slightly imbalanced, or maybe there's another reason.
Perhaps someone forgot to put a shim under the front corner of the universe's washing machine.
The video... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The video... (Score:2)
Did anyone figure out where the center of the Universe is yet?
Re:The video... (Score:2)
Re:The video... (Score:2, Interesting)
"But if it's expanding, it must be expanding _from_ somewhere, right?"
No, not in any observable way.
The best analogy I've got for this is to think about the surface of a balloon. This surface is a curved, 2-dimensional space--if you were a 2-D inhabitant on the surface, you would not know about its curavture. If you had tiny markers on the balloon, as it inflated they would become more distant from each other. There is no 'center' to your 2-D world, the space between th
Re:The video... (Score:2)
You can also get some indication of direction of travel through the cosmic microwave background. Astrophysics is not the same as cosmology.
Re:The video... (Score:2)
As for the CMB thing...what does direction of travel have to do with it? Even though the CMB is anisotropic, and might yield some vague relative sense of movement direction, that doesn't mean it would give any indication of an absolute center, since (theoretically) it was emitted b
Re:The video... (Score:2, Interesting)
On the balloon,
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The video... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The video... (Score:2)
Brilliant! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:2)
Plus (Score:2)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:2)
As I recall they recently upgraded it to support a very large influx of traffic during the shuttle launch a few months ago.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:2, Insightful)
mod parent up
mod parent a little to the left.
(Don't you wish you could do that now and then?)
Press release from 2002... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Press release from 2002... (Score:2, Funny)
http://science.slashdot.org/science/02/10/16/2046
From the video.. (Score:2, Funny)
Dave . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Oh my god . . . It's full of politicians and pundits . . . !
Re:Dave . . . (Score:2)
So *that's* what we do with 'em. Thanks for the pointer!
Who was it that said... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who was it that said... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Who was it that said... (Score:2)
This Counts (Score:5, Interesting)
As they note, there remains now the mystery of how they got so much mass to concentrate in one place. Stars don't forget all about conventional orbital dynamics just because they've spotted a black hole somewhere not too far off.
Re:This Counts (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This Counts (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This Counts (Score:2)
Re:This Counts (Score:2)
I love all those colour-enhanced, poster-like galaxy views that are provided by NASA et al, but they are produced to make things look pretty.
The visually explored areas don't really look as dramatic as the photos that are presented on television - those would be too boring.
Please insert some aliens next time. [nowtoronto.com]
Re:This Counts (Score:3, Interesting)
For you astrophysics geeks out there, how does a black hole actually form from a super dense lump of mass? Chandra's limit is all very nice, but I've never heard a compelling explanation as to how
Re:This Counts (Score:2)
Yeah, maybe it's some super dense form of matter. Something even more dense than "neutronium" (or whatever the hell you call the stuff of neutron stars). And maybe they can't see anything because there's so much of this new type of matter tightly packed together that the escape velocity abov
Re:This Counts (Score:2)
Black hole (Score:2)
In other words, light cannot escape.
And that's a function of the mass of the object irrespective how it formed.
Or what it is made of.
Re:Black hole (Score:2)
Watch a little more closely ... (Score:5, Interesting)
While the idea of black holes, dark matter, etc seems intringing, it is still a lot of theory. It is nice to see that people haven't given up, but that's not to say that this article is just as much speculation as the next.
With that said, wouldn't it be nice to focus all of humanities efforts on answering the questions we don't yet know the answers for ... instead of killing each other? I know that we already have the answer, but 42 only answers the ultimate question, we can't even answer the simple things like "do black holes exist?"
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:2)
With that said, wouldn't it be nice to focus all of humanities efforts on answering the questions we don't yet know the answers for
Killing each other comes much more naturally, and a large percentage of our technological advances revolve around finding ways to kill each other more efficiently.
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:5, Insightful)
While true, there is also a lot devoted to keeping soldiers alive. Penicillin didn't come into widespread use until after a method was devised to mass produce it. It wasn't until during WWII that efficient mass production was developed. Then you have various spin off technologies that have come from it. My hiking boots have shoe laces with teflon in them to make them stronger. A lot of medical monitoring technology has come from NASA and the DoD. I wouldn't be surprised if Medical Filters used in embergency rooms are based off of gas masks. Lightweight wheelchairs came about from needing a lighter wheel chair to get the first astronauts off the space ships (when they could barely walk). How many alloys came about from the need of stronger armor and braces? Think about how useful radar is to us today. The microwave was invented/discovered by a military radar technician who realized his choclate bar melted when he walked past the radar array. Oh the list goes on and on on both sides of the equation.
While some of this may have been discovered sooner or later during peacefull reasearch, it wouldn't have been discovered as soon.
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:3, Insightful)
If the real goal is the advancement of kno
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:3, Insightful)
> While true, there is also a lot devoted to keeping soldiers alive.
But only because dead soldiers can't kill people.
DARPA (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:DARPA (Score:2)
Tin foil hat (Score:5, Funny)
It's true, it's true! They say that the war in Iraq is supposed to give us something called IPv6!
Re:DARPA (Score:2, Funny)
So, who do we nuke to make Windows secure?
Re:DARPA (Score:2)
Redmond.
Duh.
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:2)
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:2)
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:2)
A 'light day' is the distance a proton (travelling at light speed, obviously) travels in one day. Given that light travels at 670 million [670,616,629] miles per hour, that would be 16 billion [16,094,799,096] miles.
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:2)
Sorry, the "13.7 billions years" figure still counts as speculation, supermassive black holes or no supermassive black holes. We can see galaxies that are supposed to be over 12 billion years old made of stars that have to be 4 billion years old. "At least 10 billion years" is defensible without calling up spirits from the vasty deep.
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:2)
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:2)
I'm sorry, I should have been clearer. We see galaxies whose redshift suggests (according to the standard interpretation) that they're 12 billion light years away, and thus formed in the first billion years after presumed recombination, made of stars that had to be 4 billion years old at the time. I.e., 12+4 > 13.7.
As an astrophysicist, I'd like to be an apologetic for the standard cosmological model ...
That's t
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:2)
Some? It would take more than isolated examples to weaken his statistical case. Have the selected cases been shown to be somehow representative of the rest?
If they really have something, they can make their case in a compelling way and people will listen.
Astronomers appear to listen until they establish that the evidence seems to contradict Big Bang cant. The process seems to involve rejecting evidence
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:2)
The 13.7 Gyr age of the universe is pr
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:5, Funny)
... so remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:5, Informative)
it takes light from even the nearest star years to reach us
Umm, 8 minutes, actually.
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:3, Funny)
QED
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:4, Informative)
No, actually. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler#Kepler.27s_law s [wikipedia.org]
Kepler's elliptical orbit law: The planets orbit the sun in elliptical orbits with the sun at one focus.
Kepler's equal-area law: The line connecting a planet to the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal amounts of time.
Kepler's law of periods: The time required for a planet to orbit the sun, called its period, is proportional to the long axis of the ellipse raised to the 3/2 power. The constant of proportionality is the same for all the planets.
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:3, Informative)
Pretty strong evidence, if not conclusive confirmation, of the existance of a black hole there. If anyone wants to debate the existance of black ho
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:2)
Each other? It only takes one party, if you know what I mean. If you hadn't noticed, most of the killing going on is person-to-person murder. The killing to which we (the US and allies, as nations) are currently responding (lethally, as needed) is killing done by organizations that are organized around thuggo-/theo-cratic movements that don'
Wee bit bigger than that (Score:5, Informative)
Real Mass (Score:5, Funny)
Credit (Score:2)
"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money" [google.com].
Re:Credit (Score:2)
Video? (Score:3, Informative)
Running Media Player Classic, I get diddly squat in the way of moving dots.
Of course, I suppose I could just be looking at the black hole itself......
Wierd.....Re:Video? (Score:2)
First time I've ever had MPC fail on me. Bizarre.
Re:Video? (Score:4, Funny)
Dude! It's a black hole you are looking at. That is the neat thing about being an astronomer studying black holes, you can look at a black screen and make stuff up. It is really cool, you can even get paid for doing this stuff!
Re:IrfanView (Score:2)
BS Player works, too. It's just MPC that doesn't.
How much are 17 light-hours? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Voyager I [wikipedia.org] is currently at a distance of 95 AU. 122 AU could be the distance from the sun to the heliopause [wikipedia.org].
Re:How much are 17 light-hours? (Score:3, Informative)
3 year old news, 3 year old video (Score:5, Interesting)
The article was published in Nature [nature.com] at the same time, and the video isn't new either.
Remind me why this is going up on Slashdot today?
Re:3 year old news, 3 year old video (Score:2)
The article was published in Nature at the same time, and the video isn't new either.
Remind me why this is going up on Slashdot today?
This is one of the rare cases when the dupe took 3 year to show up instead of 3 hours. There is some suspicion that this story passed very close to a black hole and suffered time dilation effects and it finally popped out today. You can almost see it in the video, that small grey spot that makes a cl
3 Year versus 3 Minute Dupe (Score:2)
Humm Humm (Score:3, Funny)
Puppeteers were unavailable for comment (Score:2)
Re:Puppeteers were unavailable for comment (Score:2)
And the most amazing thing... (Score:2)
The datestamp in the upper left corner of the frame shows frames moving from 1992 to 2006.9 !!
Cosmic Daylight Savings Time?
Isn't this story 3 years old? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
perenigricon (Score:2)
These guys better not try that in Washington [washingtonpost.com].
Re:Which way is it turning (Score:3, Informative)
Revolving is kind of a 2 dimensional way to look at it. Instead it is orbiting, which is actually a perpetual fall. So the short answer is..."yes, it is not being sucked in". Really, I would have no idea how to do the math (as most of the variable are too...variable). But basically, for every object that can be orbited you can figure out a minimum sustainable orbit versus one that is catastrophic.
Re:Which way is it turning (Score:5, Informative)
The caveat is that if one gets too close to the black hole, within what is termed the 'event horizon', then there is no turning back. Not even light escapes (generally speaking -- Stephen Hawking would be a more appropriate speaker on the subject.) This star does not appear to be doing that since it's still orbiting, and we can see it.
Re:Which way is it turning (Score:3, Informative)
There are plenty of forces that could
Re:Which way is it turning (Score:2, Informative)
Definitely, good post. I believe you refer to escape velocity, which is represented by the equation: escape velocity = sqrt(2GM/r) where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the the object which the potentially escaping object orbits, and r is the distance between the center of mass in the body being orbited and the point at which escape velocity is calculated (
Getting sucked in? (Score:5, Informative)
According to the original paper [arxiv.org] from 2002, the star is nowhere near close enough to be "tidally disrupted", so it's just orbiting. (What it says is that even at closest approach, it's still 70x too far way.)
With all those stars whipping around, though, it wouldn't be hard to get the occasional star either entirely ejected, or potted right in. More usually, an orbit would be changed so that it approaches closely enough on each orbit to have a bit of mass (say, a trillion tons) stripped off, and gets used up over the course of a few thousand years. Of course at some point we wouldn't be able to see it any more, so there could be a bunch of those happening right now.
Probably most of the mass moving near it is non-radiating low-density plasma whose motion is controlled less by gravitation than by unimaginably intense electromagnetic fields. We see stars, but there's lots else going on in there we can't see.
Re:Getting sucked in? (Score:2)
Re:You can see pictures at goatse (Score:2)
http://science.slashdot.org/science/02/10/16/2046
Re:Look Beyond The Box (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Look Beyond The Box (Score:2)
The stars are represented by a Gaussian brightness distribution, because they cannot be completely resolved. These may not match the star in exact size, and at this scale in the movie, 1 pixel is going to be at least 1 million miles. [caltech.edu]
This movie repeats the same orbit three times. At the third replay, when the camera zooms in, you can see that the star comes very close, but not exactly to, the theoretical centre of
Re:It's really.. (Score:2)
Re:milky away... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:milky away... (Score:2)
Re:I wonder if a black hole would.... (Score:2, Informative)
heat == infrared photon, which like optical photons,cannot escape a black hole. however, heat can be generated from the accretion disc of matter being pulled into the hole. e.g. gas being ripped off a nearby star and orbiting the hole.
Re:Faster than light? (Score:3, Informative)
No, as light doesn't speed up and slow down in empty space. Instead, it changes frequency. Light travelling towards a black hole (or any other gravitating object) gets blue-shifted.