Slashdot Mirror
Virtual Telescope Zooms In On Milky Way Black Hole
FiReaNGeL writes "An international team has obtained the closest views ever of what is believed to be a super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The astronomers used radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California to create a virtual telescope more than 2,800 miles across that is capable of seeing details more than 1,000 times finer than the Hubble Space Telescope. The target of the observations was the source known as Sagittarius A* ("A-star"), long thought to mark the position of a black hole whose mass is 4 million times greater than the sun. Though Sagittarius A* was discovered 30 years ago, the new observations for the first time have an angular resolution, or ability to observe small details, that is matched to the size of the event horizon."
Thats your basic Beowulf cluster of telescopes.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
An international team has obtained the closest views ever of what is believed to be a super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
*Zoom Out*... "Is that?.. It.. it.. it's Oprah eating a klondike bar. Sorry folks, our mistake."
Anything and Everything about the Net
- I'll be here the whole week. Tip your waitress. Try the veal.
Pics or it didn't happen
We synthesize what we must because we can.
Circumcision is child abuse.
HeRE!
> what does the giant black hole spin around?
Windows Vista
Sagittarius A* ? :)
Dijkstra's Scorpio is better
Ok ok, I'm not a space nerd!
As a physicist, I sometimes wish I could hear the words 'supermassive black hole' in a professional context without immediately thinking of that catchy song from their new album.
xterm -n 8
with the gravitational pull it would look like:
><
rewriting history since 2109
An exceptionally massive turtle.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
But if we don't see these things in the visible light spectrum, how will we ever recognize them during sightseeing trips? If someone tells us to "take a left at the purple nebula", but the nebula is actually brown in visible light, then we're going to get really, really lost.