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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."
Agreed, and in the interests of an intelligent thread (to which I should not be posting) I bring you "STRUCTURE OF SAGITTARIUS A* AT 86 GHz USING VLBI CLOSURE QUANTITIES" which is actually worth reading if you want to get up to date on the research into Sagittarius A*.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Just out of curiosity, how far could you push something like this? If you had an array of Hubble sized telescopes in space and could put them whatever distance you'd like from each other, what sort of results could you get?
And this (pdf warning) might be of interest as well, as it is from S Doeleman July 2008.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Veery good ones, but putting a telescope in the sky is 10-100 times the cost of one on the earth. That's why they are building ALMA, and they play with VLA, and SKA (square kilometer array).
Appropriate in this case, because one of the most loved science fiction tale about the galatic core is Larry Niven's Beowulf Schaeffer story "At the Core" (collected in Neutron Star ). Niven, however, was writing before the idea of a supermassive black hole was current.
Nonetheless, remembering Niven's story fills me with some dread at his suggestion that the close proximity of stars at the core would set off a chain of supernovas, eventually flooding the galactic periphery with deadly radiation. Now this Slashdot post has really put a downer on my day.
>... Now this Slashdot post has really put a downer on my day.
Just follow the example of the Pierson Puppeteers and you'll be safe.
Indeed the European Space Agency has had such a project for years: a space optical interferometer named Darwin, with an additional twist: by using descructive interferometry instead of constructive one, they intend to switch off a star in the center of the field of view, to see the planets around (these ones being way darker you wouldn't detect them otherwise), analyse the molecules in them etc. Needless to say, this project is still in its early phases, but indeed appears, with a schedule, in ESA's plans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(ESA)
Herve S.
So when do we get the mobile phone telescope? We just need to get thousands of people to point their cellphone cameras at the same spot in the sky, right?
This guy's the limit!