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Space Science

Deep in the Core 209

Posted by Zonk from the star-billiards dept.
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."
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Deep in the Core

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  • UPDATE (Score:5, Funny)

    by dirtsurfer ( 595452 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:40PM (#13860373) Journal
    this slashdot effect enabled astronomers to further pinpoint the mass of the black hole, which is confidently estimated to be somewhere in the server room

  • Circling the drain (Score:5, Funny)

    by Luigi30 ( 656867 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:42PM (#13860381)
    So our galaxy is like spit bubbles circling the great cosmic drain?
    • Yep. Spirals seem to be an extremely popular form of matter for very large and very small things. Some galaxies are spirals but so is DNA.

      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)

    by Lord Flipper ( 627481 ) * on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:43PM (#13860387)
    really is pretty awesome. I had no idea that this "slingshot effect" was so 'graphic'...wrong word, okay, 'extreme'. Quite amazing.
    • This really blows my mind. Seeing the center of our Galaxy like this, the point we're all spinning around.

      Did anyone figure out where the center of the Universe is yet?
      • While it's true that this does represent a black hole at the center of the Galaxy, we aren't orbiting it in the same way that the Earth orbits the Sun. While the sun represents the vast majority of mass in the Solar System, this two million solar mass black hole positively pales in comparison to the two hundred billion solar masses that represent the galaxy's distributed mass.

      • Re:The video... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Alamais ( 4180 )
        There is no center of the Universe!

        "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
        • That should read, the currently prevailing theory says there's no center of the universe. For a scientist in training you sure do speak in absolutes. Perhaps when your training is finished you'll learn the concept of a THEORY.

          You can also get some indication of direction of travel through the cosmic microwave background. Astrophysics is not the same as cosmology.
          • I tend to speak with such brevity when I assume I'm speaking to one familiar with the scientific method. Chill. Or if you prefer: The Flying Spaghetti Monster told me it was so. May you too be touched by his noodly appendage.

            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
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Brilliant! (Score:5, Funny)

    by mboverload ( 657893 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:44PM (#13860391) Journal
    meehawl: Lets link to a mpg video file on the front page of Slashdot! Nothing could go wrong! Zonk: Brilliant!

    • Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tyler Eaves ( 344284 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:53PM (#13860432)
      It's only 500kb. With all the bloat these days, maybe webpages are approaching that size, easily, if you count the size of the images.
      • It's not a great idea to link to those in a slashdot article either.

      • Plus (Score:2)

        by Daath ( 225404 )
        Very true! Plus the video link is only one connection, whereas browsing the web page would be four at least (the standard), or in several peoples case, many more (firefox, http pipelining, use about:config, search for pipelining, enable and increase ;) )
    • Well, nasa.gov is usually a pretty stable site.

      As I recall they recently upgraded it to support a very large influx of traffic during the shuttle launch a few months ago.

  • Press release from 2002... (Score:4, Funny)

    by mdobossy ( 674488 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:44PM (#13860393)
    Is this a 3 year old article?? Or did we just pass too close to a black hole, bending time or something???

  • From the video.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by nrgy ( 835451 )
    it looks to me that the dot just changed his mind on which direction he wanted to go. That or maybe he didnt like one of the other dots in that direction.

  • Dave . . . (Score:5, Funny)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:46PM (#13860402)
    the object at the centre of the galaxy is definitely composed of some exotically dense form of matter.

    Oh my god . . . It's full of politicians and pundits . . . !

  • Who was it that said... (Score:5, Funny)

    by FlyByPC ( 841016 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:47PM (#13860406) Homepage
    Black holes are where God divided by zero?

  • This Counts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Markus Registrada ( 642224 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:51PM (#13860417)
    This certainly counts as positive evidence of a black hole or its moral equivalent. Note that the details date from 2002. Before 2002, we had a lot of conjecture. Now we have proof. Everybody who was skeptical before 2002 (or who hadn't heard about this yet) was right to be skeptical. Given this, there seems no room left for skepticism about supermassive whatsits.

    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.

    • Is it possible that the massive intersection of gravitational fields generated by all of the stars in our galaxy circling a common center point create a virtual black hole at the center. Maybe there is no real black hole there at all. Furthermore, the energy emissions detected from the center of our galaxy could be the result of the energy released from the massive high speed collissions of the energy emitted from all the stars. It is such a huge amount of energy released because the collision is at a pe

    • 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)

      by njh ( 24312 )
      It doesn't show that there is a singularity though; only that there is a lot of mass in that region. It could equally be a new super dense form of matter that we don't yet understand. Their claim that if it were a super dense form of matter then it must turn into a black hole sounds like wishful thinking to me.

      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
      • It could equally be a new super dense form of matter that we don't yet understand. Their claim that if it were a super dense form of matter then it must turn into a black hole sounds like wishful thinking to me.

        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

        • Or maybe they can't see anything because all light coming off it is so redshifted it can't be distinguished from the background. Or maybe the surface is just painted matt black. You make a leap from dense matter to singularity which I was questioning.
      • The only thing that matters is the fact it is BLACK.
        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.

  • Watch a little more closely ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperDuG ( 134989 ) <<kt.celce> <ta> <eb>> on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:51PM (#13860421) Homepage Journal
    While I agree this is a pretty impressive sight to see ... even the video shows this isn't exactly as it appears. That "ricochet" that plops it halfway around it's course so quickly, is actually almost an entire earth year. There is still quite [eurekalert.org] a bit [llnl.gov] of speculation [uiuc.edu] on whether or not Black Holes even exist.

    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?"


    • 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?


      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)

        by Ironsides ( 739422 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @07:31PM (#13860603) Homepage Journal
        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.

        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.
        • True, but also keep in mind that there are things that might have been even better that we still haven't discovered for lack of funding. Research, particularly basic (non goal-oriented) research, pays enormous dividends. Even if it's defense-based, the ROI is so enormous that the discoveries routinely affect everyone. Yes, we get many knock-off products from defense research, but that does not mean that this is the best possible way to allocate research dollars.

          If the real goal is the advancement of kno
        • > > 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.

          > 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)

      by vlad_petric ( 94134 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @07:03PM (#13860478) Homepage
      You'd be surprised how much scientific research is sponsored by DARPA (in the States, of course). While it's likely that this particular piece of research was not, in general DARPA funds a lot more than NSF. In other words, "killing each other", to a certain extent, drives scientific research. "killing each other" gave us the IP stack of protocols, for instance ...
      • Actually ARPA gave us the IP stack, and that was only sortof since the guys at Xerox PARC steered everyone in the right direction in the first place. Also from what I've read, once the "D" got added, funding was much more directed at the "Defense" region of research

      • Tin foil hat (Score:5, Funny)

        by SkyFire360 ( 889512 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @07:23PM (#13860578)
        "killing each other" gave us the IP stack of protocols

        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)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )
        "killing each other", to a certain extent, drives scientific research. "killing each other" gave us the IP stack of protocols, for instance ...

        So, who do we nuke to make Windows secure?
               
        • "killing each other", to a certain extent, drives scientific research. "killing each other" gave us the IP stack of protocols, for instance ...
          So, who do we nuke to make Windows secure?

          Redmond.

          Duh.

    • How is the video not exactly as it appears? The timeline is displayed in the top corner. The summary even points out it takes 15 years to orbit the black hole. There's no need to 'debunk' that it's not doing the orbit in real time, it already tells you that. Regardless of whether there's still speculation about the existence of black holes, the video is in fact, exactly as it appears.
      • Not only is the video just as it appears, it's also funny that speculation is even brought up here. This video provides evidence AGAINST that very speculation. The facts are all there (no matter how many people may try to ignore Newton's and Kepler's laws); this star is orbiting something extremely massive that we cannot see. That, to me, is the very definition of a "black hole."
      • It's not a timeline, it's the distance; like the scales they put on maps.
        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.
        • Actually I was talking about the time it takes the star to complete its orbit. Which is written in the top left corner going from 1992 to 2005+. Maybe timeline is not the best word, but the point is the video is not in real time, and that fact is made clear thanks to those time numbers.

    • Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by potpie ( 706881 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @07:15PM (#13860541) Journal
      Apparently you haven't studied these things. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, it takes light from even the nearest star years to reach us, the Earth's mass is only a fraction of Jupiter's, Jupiter's mass is only a fraction of the sun's, the sun's mass is only a fraction of some other stars that exist, and on and on. So the general idea is that a lot of the things in the universe are a lot bigger than you and me and our tiny planet. So if a star (and just think how much mass is in a star compared to you) orbits something in 15 years, you don't think it's just a bit interesting that it covers about half of its entire orbit in one fifteenth of the total time?
      • Apparently you haven't studied these things. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, [various true statements] ...

        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.

        • What? I don't understand your objection. Are you talking about those galaxies that we see as they were 12 billion years ago, or close galaxies 12 billion years old? And what do 4 billion year old stars have to do with it? As an astrophysicist, I'd like to be an apologetic for the standard cosmological model, but I don't understand your problem with it.
          • Are you talking about those galaxies that we see as they were 12 billion years ago...

            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

            • Most of the things you bring up have been discredited at some level. Some of Halton Arp's "associated" systems in particular have been quite strongly discredited. It's not a matter of wanting one thing or another, it's just that the evidence you cite isn't very compelling to most of us. And when it's a small handfull of folks crying about something, they die off and we don't worry about it anymore. If they really have something, they can make their case in a compelling way and people will listen. Arp,
              • Some of Halton Arp's "associated" systems in particular have been quite strongly discredited.

                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

        • No, stellar age estimates are in line with universe age measurements these days. I don't believe we have any cases like the one you suggest. There was recently a paper discussed here on slashot (Mobasher et al. 2005, xxx.lanl.gov) about a very massive young galaxy at z=6.5. The best fit model for its energy distribution was consistent with the age of the universe at z=6.5, although the mass was large and a may pose a puzzle for current theories of galaxy formation.

          The 13.7 Gyr age of the universe is pr

      • Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Sponge Bath ( 413667 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @08:18PM (#13860803)
        The universe is 13.7 billion years old, it takes light from even the nearest star years to reach us, the Earth's mass is only a fraction of Jupiter's, Jupiter's mass is only a fraction of the sun's, the sun's mass is only a fraction of some other stars that exist...

        ... 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)

        by Fulcrum of Evil ( 560260 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @08:18PM (#13860806)

        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)

        by wkitchen ( 581276 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @09:46PM (#13861150)
        So if a star (and just think how much mass is in a star compared to you) orbits something in 15 years, you don't think it's just a bit interesting that it covers about half of its entire orbit in one fifteenth of the total time?
        Good point. Also consider that Pluto orbits the sun once every 248 years. This star's nearest approach to the object is about 3 times the distance from pluto to the sun, and since it has an extremely eliptical orbit, it spends most of its time much further away than even that. For it to orbit in 15 years, and to cover the near half of that orbit in only about 1 year, means that the thing it's orbiting is incredibly massive. Even if it isn't a black hole, and even if the fundamental ideas about black holes turned out to be very wrong, you can still bet that, whatever it is, it is something that is similarly strange and interesting.
        • Yeah, but since the star S2 is so much heavier than tiny Pluto (not even a planet maybe, but just an asteroid), therefore S2 falls much faster than Pluto. You can reproduce this effect easily at home. Drop a quarter from one hand at the same time that you drop a tissue from the other. Now imagine how much faster a star would fall! And of course, this proves that there is a hole at the center of the gravity, since you can't fall unless there's a hole to fall into.

          QED

      • Re:Watch a little more closely ... (Score:4, Informative)

        by JambisJubilee ( 784493 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @12:34AM (#13861780)
        you don't think it's just a bit interesting that it covers about half of its entire orbit in one fifteenth of the total time?

        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.

    • Knowing, not speculating, that this star is orbiting to within 17 light hours of a given point and and that the whole path is an elipse which is about 10 light days across on it's long axis, that star is reaching orbital speeds approaching .01c on the return swing. So it's definitely orbiting something *very* massive, and we obviously don't "see" something there.

      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
    • How is the video not as it appears? You didn't expect the video to be in real time, did you? Among non-crackpots, there is no longer much debate about whether or not black holes exist. The alternatives have either been ruled out observationally, or have serious problems on theoretical grounds. Disclaimer: IAAA.
    • 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?

      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)

    by ottffssent ( 18387 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:54PM (#13860435)
    The http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0210426:linkedarticl e [arxiv.org] says the "enclosed point mass" (read: black hole) has a mass of 3.7 million solar masses, +- 1.5M solar masses. Not 2M solar masses, as the article summary indicates. For most people, myself included, this is a meaningless distinction, but in the interest of scientific accuracy, I thought I'd mention it.

  • Video? (Score:3, Informative)

    by cbiltcliffe ( 186293 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @07:17PM (#13860549) Homepage Journal
    Anybody else get a plain black screen for the video?
    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......
    • Load it in Windows Media Player and it works fine.

      First time I've ever had MPC fail on me. Bizarre.

    • Re:Video? (Score:4, Funny)

      by slashname3 ( 739398 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @08:49PM (#13860920)
      Anybody else get a plain black screen for the video?

      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!

  • How much are 17 light-hours? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nherm ( 889807 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @07:48PM (#13860662) Journal
    nherm@localhost:~$ units
    2084 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units

    You have: 17 light-hours
    You want: au
    * 122.64411
    / 0.0081536729
    nherm@localhost:~$

    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].

  • 3 year old news, 3 year old video (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Darth Cow ( 533706 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @07:58PM (#13860716)
    Take a look at the original press release [eso.org], dated 16 October 2002.

    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?
    • Take a look at the original press release, dated 16 October 2002.

      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
    • Your comment is a dupe [slashdot.org] of one posted 3 minutes earlier.

  • Humm Humm (Score:3, Funny)

    by Inf0phreak ( 627499 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @08:01PM (#13860734)
    *Begins humming to himself* Deep in the Core, the galactic core, a black hole spins toniiiiight
  • Calls to the General Products Corporation have not been returned.
  • Is that unlike most astronomical images, which show events that have occurred in the distant past, this one shows events from the future!

    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)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) * on Monday October 24, 2005 @12:13AM (#13861699) Homepage
    It looks like all the observations, measurements, analyses and even the 'press embargo' are over three years old. Are there any updates?

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • From TFA: 'Astronomers refer to the extreme orbital points as perenigricon (closest to the Black Hole) and aponigricon (farthest away).'

    These guys better not try that in Washington [washingtonpost.com].

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