Slashdot Mirror
Deep in the Core
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."
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
So our galaxy is like spit bubbles circling the great cosmic drain?
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really is pretty awesome. I had no idea that this "slingshot effect" was so 'graphic'...wrong word, okay, 'extreme'. Quite amazing.
Is it revolving around the black hole counter-clockwise like in america or clockwise like in australia?... wait, guess it depends on how you look at it... but seriously, since it is revolving around the black hole, does that mean it is slowly being sucked in?
I like suggestions, but I don't like contributing towards them.
meehawl: Lets link to a mpg video file on the front page of Slashdot! Nothing could go wrong! Zonk: Brilliant!
Is this a 3 year old article?? Or did we just pass too close to a black hole, bending time or something???
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.
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 . . . !
Black holes are where God divided by zero?
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
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.
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?"
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
The http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0210426:linkedarticl e 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.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
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 ...
The Raven
A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you're talking real masses.
Da Blog
I hereby claim longest dupe period yet! I reserve the right to submit this article 5 years hence.
/. search function really is a stinker. I should just use Google for this sort of thing. Blame APOD, it was their photo today!
I guess the
Da Blog
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......
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Load it in Windows Media Player and it works fine.
First time I've ever had MPC fail on me. Bizarre.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
"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!
Exotically dense.. so we're talking what.. George-w-bush-head caliber numbers? If so it's a wonder helicopters can still carry him around with the mass of 2 million suns on his shoulders.
Translation: we now know how big the galactic toilet is. Bawooooosh.
Thanks, but I can't really take the credit...
"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money".
Da Blog
Of course, you look at it very differently from how I do. You say "killing people supports research" (implying that war is good or some shit), whereas I say "killing people co-opts our best researchers," implying that we have better things to do. Likewise, if we weren't directing all our resources towards killing each other, we could have more for pure research into things like dry-land agriculture or basic physics.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
haha, goatse. it will never die.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Yes, but how many volkswagen beetles is that?
running Win32? Get the free viewer and the plugins - http://www.irfanview.com/ - this is not a paid endorsement
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
The Voyager I is currently at a distance of 95 AU. 122 AU could be the distance from the sun to the heliopause.
According to the original paper 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.
I'm not gonna click on that mpg link unless someone verifies it's not a goatse vid.
Anyone else see that star that goes right through the area of the blackhole without even a flinch? I was under the impression black holes like to eat stars for breakfast/lunch/second lunch/dinner. Or maybe they're friends?
just a dyson sphere are the centre of the universe.
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?
*Begins humming to himself* Deep in the Core, the galactic core, a black hole spins toniiiiight
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
Ask yourself a question.
What type of Galaxy is the Milky Way Galaxy?
The answer is, it is a spiral galaxy.
Though there is many theories on the origin of a spiral galaxy. This video only further supports the theory on the formations of a spiral galaxy. Of course, if Sol is being pulled towards the super massive black hole, time would be actually be slowing down for us.
Do keep in mind, this video still does not show you a black hole but suggests stars is being effected by one.
\
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Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
subject says it all
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 ;) )
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
I wonder if S2 has any planets still and how the gravity of the Black Hole would affect them? Is it possible they have been stripped long ago when the star fell into the Black Hole's gravity?
Your comment is a dupe of one posted 3 minutes earlier.
Da Blog
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?
My god this article summary should be held up as the shining example of summaries.
Now let's hope it doesn't get duped in the next few hours.
Radiate heat or is heat unable to escape just like light?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
It looks like all the observations, measurements, analyses and even the 'press embargo' are over three years old. Are there any updates?
Kevin Fox
17 light hours is roughly 113 AUs, if the star passes that close to the black hole, I wonder if the line of the node of the orbit will precess forward enough to measure due to the frame dragging from the spin of the black hole. That would also help prove it's a black hole. The spin of the black hole should be pretty fast since if formed by capturing matter in orbit. The Einstein "Gravity Probe B" tried to measure the same affect in earth orbit but it's so tiny in the Earth's case, a 2 Million Ms black hole would have a big frame drag effect. I guess it comes down to whether the star gets close enough and long enough to get dragged much. http://einstein.stanford.edu/ Mark
These guys better not try that in Washington.
at its closest approach it swings within 17 light hours of the black hole (around three times the distance between the Sun and Pluto).
As this is said to be the closest star, let's have a little more fun with the distance, just to make it clear how far away from each other these things really are.
Moon is 384 400 kilometers away from Earth
The star is 18 347 298 416 kilometers away from the black hole (47700 times the distance!)
Distance from Earth to Mars ~ 50 000 000 kilometers
The star from the black hole, 18 347 298 416 km, about 370 times the distance!
From Earth to Sun, it's 149 597 870 kilometers
That's still about 120 times the distance from the star to the black hole!
Mercury, the closest planet to our Sun, is 57 910 000 kilometers away from it
The closest star to a black whole is 316 times as far away.
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.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
If a black hole can create a gravitational force so powerful it can suck in light, doesn't that mean that when the light is being sucked in it is travelling faster than light towards the black hole?
-- There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, And those who don't.
is this video sent to us from the future? the counter goes to 2006.9
Seeing those stars orbit an invisible point in space is neat... But want I want to see is one of those stars "vanish" when its orbit takes it to a point where the BH is between it and us. Granted, that it dissappeared would not, in and of itself, prove that the black hole is a black hole... it would only mean that the object absorbed all the radiation. What would prove things is the strange data that would be arive as the light from the star would pass near the event horizon on its way here... we would see some screwy stuff.
On high-resolution images, it is possible to discern thousands of individual stars within the central, one light-year wide region (this corresponds to about one-quarter of the distance to "Proxima Centauri", the star nearest to the solar system).
In other words, if there's a bright interesting maybe highly populated interesting region in our galaxy, Earth is not at it!!
Radiation? Evolution can counter it..