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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."
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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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.
HeRE!
> what does the giant black hole spin around?
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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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rewriting history since 2109
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.
An exceptionally massive turtle.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
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.
"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".
It's all part of the same electromagnetic spectrum. The fact that you can only see a very narrow bit of it doesn't change the fact that the rest can be used to look at things with the right tools. The only difference is wavelength. If you had the right "eyes" it would all be the same to you.
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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.
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.