Very Large Telescope Observes Gas Cloud Being Ripped Apart By Black Hole

An anonymous reader writes "New observations (PDF) from ESO's Very Large Telescope show for the first time a gas cloud being ripped apart by the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The cloud is now so stretched that its front part has passed the closest point and is traveling away from the black hole at more than 10 million km/h, whilst the tail is still falling towards it."

Other Resources

[tist]

Dr. Gillessen's web page has additional information here - https://wiki.mpe.mpg.de/gascloud/FrontPage [mpe.mpg.de] and the ESO website has an article as well thatexplains what is happening - http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1332/ [eso.org]
JJW

Re:Metric, you know?

[gstoddart]

As to your PM, for as much as I would like to get into project management, the more I see the folks in the industry the less it becomes viable.

Like anything, it depends entirely on the PM -- I worked on a project the other year that had 3 PMs (out of necessity due to the scale of it).

The lead PM had a very clear path to how we were going to do it, and what had to happen first ... he's the best PM I've ever worked with. He was hard-assed, and demanded a lot. There was a damned good reason for all of it, his timelines were as reasonable as they could be, and he ran with all of the administrivia to ground to make sure it got done so when we finished one set of tasks everything we needed to start the next was already in place. I've respected only a handful of PMs, and he was head and shoulders above the rest.

One of the PMs was utterly useless and everything assigned to her she tried to foist off on me -- and I had to keep telling her the reason she was doing the 'boring' tasks of getting approvals was so we could focus on actually building it.

We got a massive undertaking done on-time, and with great success.

So, if you have a PM who has been in the industry a while and isn't going to get bamboozled by someone, understands you need to have a good clear plan for what you're doing, and can keep everyone on track -- a good PM can be the difference between the success or failure of a large project.

And, a PM who hasn't got enough domain expertise to follow the plot, isn't focused on every detail and staying on top of them ... then, yeah, some of those can be complete wankers who don't help anything get done.

There are PMs out there who are are really good, have enough domain expertise to understand what you're saying (and know when they need to ask questions), and will focus on making it possible for you to do your part. Those ones are really valuable to have around.

If you can do that, you might find yourself very much in demand, because good, thorough PMs are hard to find.