Slashdot Log In
Black Hole At Center of Milky Way Confirmed
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Dec 10, 2008 10:00 AM
from the i-can-see-it-from-here dept.
from the i-can-see-it-from-here dept.
Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that a German team has confirmed the existence of a Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the center of the Milky Way, using the 3.5m New Technology Telescope and the 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Both are operated by the European Southern Observatory (Eso).
The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal.
According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
I guess that... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I guess that... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I guess that... (Score:5, Funny)
I've seen Black Perl, it was ALL regular expressions. So many that there was a regular expression event horizon, with only preceding elements escaping and at the center was a nondeterministic finite automata. Quite a sight.
Parent
Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)
Boy, that sucks.
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)
The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun
Don't worry, I hear black is a very slimming colour. :)
Parent
We're living in an accretion disk (Score:5, Interesting)
n/t
About time! (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously (surely no one missed the bad relativity joke in that title :-p) though, are black holes really still considered theoretical constructs? For example, Wikipedia starts with "A black hole is a theoretical region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that ...". And for Wikipedia haters, this is repeated in literature too.
Meanwhile, in this article -- "the best empirical evidence that super-massive black holes do exist". And besides, I thought many scientific articles bring up black holes now and then without questioning, anyway.
Re:About time! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, they are. We still have no proof of their actual existence.
Parent
Re:About time! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:About time! (Score:5, Funny)
We'll have a proof as soon as the CERN guys turn on the LHC.
And if so we will have a remarkably short period of time to write a paper about it.
Parent
Re:About time! (Score:5, Funny)
(I mean... the astrophysics thing)
Good thing you put the 'astrophysics thing' on there. Otherwise we might have seen one of the few instances where a goatse link would be considered ontopic.
Parent
Re:About time! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:About time! (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean how it should read "four million times as massive"? Because you know, everything weighs more near a black hole... Even light.
Parent
Re:About time! (Score:5, Funny)
>"four million times heavier than our sun"
Can we please stop with the "yo mama" jokes? Please? :-)
Parent
Re:About time! (Score:5, Insightful)
are black holes really still considered theoretical constructs? ... I thought many scientific articles bring up black holes now and then without questioning, anyway.
Black holes do have a solid foundation in theory, and we can observe the gravitational effects they have on their neighbours. However, as far as I know, Hawking radiation [wikipedia.org] is the only way to detect them directly and I don't think that this has been observed.
The authors of this article are showing observational evidence for a supermassive (millions of solar masses) black hole in the centre of our Galaxy - something that was thought to be at the centre of many galaxies but was still in open question. The observations made during this study have shown that our Galaxy has one, using techniques that are not an option for galaxies further away, thus giving us the best evidence that supermassive black holes exist.
Parent
Re:About time! (Score:5, Insightful)
Dark matter is in the same boat. Same with dark energy and strings. Physics seems to be moving toward explanations involving unobservable objects, whether that's right or not remains to be seen. Question is, can it ever be seen? See?
Parent
Re:About time! (Score:5, Funny)
You mean 'religion'. Oooops, did I say that out loud?
Parent
Re:About time! (Score:5, Informative)
For the mass of the Sun the event horizon is approximately 3 km, and for that of the Earth about 9 mm.
That means the entire mass of the sun or the earth, if compressed down into a black hole, would have a radius of 3km or 9mm, respectively. The rest of your post is very silly and doesn't seem to be based on any facts or reputable research/researchers. :(
Parent
It always bothered me... (Score:5, Funny)
... that they have names (Antu, Kueyen, Melipal, Yepun) for the individual telescopes in the VLT, but could only come up with "very large telescope" for the whole array.
Please include at least a transformers reference in the next one. Thanks.
So we've found life? (Score:5, Funny)
Someone at the center of our galaxy obviously beat us to getting their Large Hadron Collider [wikipedia.org] working before we did.
Yes, that makes lots of sense. (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly. The pulsars emit gamma rays like the dung beetle emit pheromones. The planets circle their star like insects circle a dome light in the porch. Analogies form in the mind of submitters and editors of slashdot the same way driftwood washes up in the beaches of South Carolina.
Re:Yes, that makes lots of sense. (Score:5, Funny)
Analogies form in the mind of submitters and editors of slashdot the same way driftwood washes up in the beaches of South Carolina.
Soaking wet, and surrounded by syringes and condoms?
Parent
Excuse me? Like a pearl? (Score:5, Funny)
So black holes are irritating to the Great Space Oyster which deposits stars, dust, and gas around it to prevent irritation?
There's my nomination for worst science analogy this year.
Re:OMG we are all going to die (Score:5, Funny)
Ahhh arts students, the sort of people who fall for...
At least they make good venti iced soy mochas ;-)
Parent