Deep in the Core

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Posted by Zonk on Sunday October 23, 2005 @11:38AM 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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This Counts by Markus+Registrada · 2005-10-23 11:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
Watch a little more closely ... by SuperDuG · 2005-10-23 11:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

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 a bit of speculation 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?"

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Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
1. Re:Watch a little more closely ... by wkitchen · 2005-10-23 14:46 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
DARPA by vlad_petric · 2005-10-23 12:03 · Score: 4, Interesting

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 ...

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The Raven
How much are 17 light-hours? by nherm · 2005-10-23 12:48 · Score: 3, Interesting

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 is currently at a distance of 95 AU. 122 AU could be the distance from the sun to the heliopause.
3 year old news, 3 year old video by Darth+Cow · 2005-10-23 12:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

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?
Re:milky away... by corngrower · 2005-10-23 16:09 · Score: 4, Interesting

Actually, there is some recent debate as to whether or not the milky way galaxie is a spiral galaxie. Some astronomers think it has a different shape, something like a bar if i recall correctly.