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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."
Thats your basic Beowulf cluster of telescopes.
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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."
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The milky way is our galaxy.
Also, 2 different brands of chocolate bar.
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"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"
- ok, but HST is an optical telescope, not "radio dish".
Can we stop saying "virtual telescopes" and start using the proper grown up terms? Interferometry and Aperture Synthesis aren't hard to understand. It's a pet peeve of mine, and slashdotters should be of a level of intelligence that they can understand this stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis
Yes you get the same angular resolution as a much larger telescope (one as big as the distance between the telescopes), which is why you do it. However it's important to note that you you don't increase the amount of radiation you're collecting - it's still just the sum of the telescopes you're using.
I'll try to put it simply. Let's use optical telescopes as a familiar example. (In practice optical interferometry is much harder than radio astronomy, but I digress). The larger the diameter of the mirror (or lens) the more light we collect, and the smaller an object we can look at with reasonable detail (There is a physical relationship between the diameter of the telescope and the smallest thing you can resolve with it). We could space multiple telescopes a good distance apart and increase how small a piece of the sky we can look at in detail. The detail we could now resolve depends on the distance between the telescopes. However we're still only collecting as much light in total as the sum of the light collected by each scope. So even though we can look at a much smaller part of the sky, we won't be able to brighten up the image as much as if we had the larger telescope. It's still worth doing and it still yields discoveries, but it's not the same as having a massive telescope.
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HeRE!
> what does the giant black hole spin around?
Windows Vista
Nope. Gravitic force gets weaker the further you get from the mass exerting it.
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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:
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http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=expanding
To determine that something is expanding you must first know its dimensions. Since we don't know the dimensions of the universe, we can't really tell if it is expanding or not. There is movement within the observed portion of the universe that is compatible with the concept of an expanding universe.
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Apologies, it was a straight copy and paste of the title. Luckily, I posted them in Chrome, so you may sue Google if you have suffered any permanent injuries as they hold all the rights :).
An exceptionally massive turtle.
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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.
Hmm..... Near the "A-Star"?
Does this mean that in the center of our galaxy is the biggest "A-Hole" in our galaxy?
Whew! This water sure is cold!
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?
That is basically the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), which alas has had funding troubles recently. The component telescopes are not the size of the Hubble, but the idea is exactly as you suggest. One thing you could do with this is detect Earth sized planets in a solar system like ours out to a reasonable distance.
Sagittarius A* - Previous location of the Large Hadron Collider
Here, actually.