Slashdot Mirror
Black Hole At Center of Milky Way Confirmed
Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that a German team has confirmed the existence of a Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the center of the Milky Way, using the 3.5m New Technology Telescope and the 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Both are operated by the European Southern Observatory (Eso).
The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal.
According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit."
...dark matter makes a black perl?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Boy, that sucks.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Seriously (surely no one missed the bad relativity joke in that title :-p) though, are black holes really still considered theoretical constructs? For example, Wikipedia starts with "A black hole is a theoretical region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that ...". And for Wikipedia haters, this is repeated in literature too.
Meanwhile, in this article -- "the best empirical evidence that super-massive black holes do exist". And besides, I thought many scientific articles bring up black holes now and then without questioning, anyway.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Come on folks its time to have fun with the arts students again. We are all going to die because as we know a black hole sucks everything into it and these guys have only just discovered it which means it must be new so it can only be a matter of days/weeks/months a year at most before our solar system is devoured by this giant black hole.
Run for the hills, there is no escape.
Ahhh arts students, the sort of people who fall for the "di-hydrogen monoxide is potentially lethal but the government are letting it into our water supplies".
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Here is the press release from ESO
Something bothers me about a huge black hole being at the center of our galaxy -- it's really, really AWESOME. Real science is much more boring.
I think the scientists need to do more careful experiments.
... that they have names (Antu, Kueyen, Melipal, Yepun) for the individual telescopes in the VLT, but could only come up with "very large telescope" for the whole array.
Please include at least a transformers reference in the next one. Thanks.
... yes, you guessed right, there is a black hole, I confirm it. ding!, ding!, ding!, ding! 5000 points for you...
Now, onto our next riddle of the sky... guess where are the aliens.
Obligatory. Now that that's been said you can make intelligent comments in this thread.
So does this discovery change the odds for the universe ending in a heat death or a big crunch? AANA astrophysicist, but I would guess that, if galaxies are more likely to form around black holes, it means that there's a large gravitational pull right at the center of the more mass-dense areas of the universe and thus increases the chance of the universe ending in a big crunch vis-a-vis heat death.
"There ain't no milk today, it wasn't always so. The company was gay, they turned night into day." The centre of the Milkyway must be a very inhospitable place, with lots of high energy radiation. That could explain why we are out here on a spiral arm.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Wonder what the orientation of the black hole is... Are we on the same plane as the accretion disk? How close are we to the event horizon? How close is the sun to the event horizon? Is it possible to collect and examine the radiation from black hole by approaching it from the "top"?
...or the remants of it, anyway.
Someone at the center of our galaxy obviously beat us to getting their Large Hadron Collider working before we did.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Exactly. The pulsars emit gamma rays like the dung beetle emit pheromones. The planets circle their star like insects circle a dome light in the porch. Analogies form in the mind of submitters and editors of slashdot the same way driftwood washes up in the beaches of South Carolina.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
four million times as massive, you mean?
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
So God's in the black hole or what ?
"What does God, need with a spaceship?"
couldn't help it.
just kidding. everyone knows that all we are/have is a gift from the creators, & that our only purpose here is to care for one another.
So black holes are irritating to the Great Space Oyster which deposits stars, dust, and gas around it to prevent irritation?
There's my nomination for worst science analogy this year.
...they didn't even turn on the LHC.
I am not Einstein, and I could have told you that, what gave it away, seeing all those solar systems slowly moving towards the middle, the fact that galaxies usually look like big black holes anyways, or just maybe when those 2 galaxies collided a few months back (last year maybe?)...they showed patterns of gravity towards each other.....too little too late guys.
I thought it was confirmed that at the center of each galaxy is a super massive black hole.
Due to the huge time distortion of such a massive black hole, PBS NOVA aired a show on the same subject 3 months ago http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blackhole/ Seems the German research got sucked back in time and used to show the orbits of the stars around the black hole.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
When i heard that there were black holes in other galaxies, i was fine with that, since they are so far away. But now i hear there is one in OUR galaxy? That's kinda scary, since its so close to us!
Finally, we can all sleep soundly knowing that we are indeed circling the drain...
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Just like filth in the flow of a draining bathtub... So we're the filth... or tiny bits on larger pieces of filth actually... And the water is the matter we can't see... obviously. Hmm... I wonder... who's bathing?
I wonder what the diameter of its event horizon is. TFA didn't say.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Slashdot editors are so out of it sometimes.
Errr... we knew this already (the problem is the quote from Genzel, not the original article).
This has provoked much mirth in my astronomy institute all afternoon. We will shortly be releasing new papers on "Sun powered by nuclear reactions", "Milky way a spiral Galaxy", and so on....
http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.4674
Amazing that a star they studied orbited the galactic center in only 16 years.
The paper seems to assume the existence of black holes; it addresses their observations rather than any theoretical causes. Saying these observations confirm a black hole seems a bit of a stretch. It just confirms that stars are circling around the galactic center, which may or may not contain anything at all.
If there is that has GOT to be a solid foundation for reasoning how/why galaxies form...right? Well either that or they're formed after the fact; I like the first one better, though.
I'm sure you didn't really mean to write that. The discovery that stars move in orbits where there is no central mass would be far more exciting and disruptive to physics than finding a black hole there.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
We're living in a galactic goatse and earth is just a mole!
... the Hugh Jazz telescope?
The researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany said the black hole was 27,000 light years, or 158 thousand, million, million miles from the Earth. Is that a real number?
Is there a super star gate there as well?
This sounds like a plot for a Futurama movie.
So God's in the black hole or what ?
"What does God, need with a spaceship?"
couldn't help it.
To get the full Shatnerism, you need some, more, commas ;-)
I for one welcome the Great Space Oyster and await the judgment of its Great Fleshy Foot!
Turn the 28 stars into planets and take one away, and you may be close to having a Reality Bomb, a la Doctor Who.
the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit
surely it's a bad analogy...they're talking about what's outside forming around object in the centre (galaxy to black hole) but making the analogy with what's formed in the centre with what's on the outside (pearl to grit).... how can a pearl be formed AROUND grit???? surely the grit is around the pearl once formed...
this is a virtual insanity that always seems to be governed by our love for this useless twisting of our new technology.
To quote Carl Sagan, "They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
And you can help the advancement of science by not drowning out the reasoned discussion of *actual scientists* by not blathering on about nonsense. Science is all about the signal-to-noise, you know.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Pearls don't form around grit, do they? But around intruding organisms like nematode worms. Actually, I love to be pedantic.
Doubt.It, The comic
THEY got their LHC running just fine, thank you. CERN can't get it done, or we'd have our own galaxy by now and phooey on the Milky Way thing.
I tell ya, if ya want something done right...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
(obscure reference - see how many get it)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
You mean, pearls are formed by nacre spiraling in towards the grit, inexorably drawn by the forces of gravity??? All this time I thought they were formed by bivalves secreting the substance around the grit to protect themselves from irritation -- silly me! Can somebody please explain this with a car analogy instead?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Damn. I was going to say
"What does God need with a black hole?"
Check out my sysadmin blog!
yawn... So how many light years of light transmission did it take to get these readings? Does it account of objects in and out of the light source? The black hole may and maynot be there. The correct result would be, it appears a blackhole existed at this point in time (which may or maynot be there now).
Just only one black hole? You don't say... And here I thought there's 2 of them. A male one and a female one, twisting and turning like a big ying-yang symbol...
Here are the stellar orbits around the hole: http://www.mpe.mpg.de/ir/GC/index.php
The star closest to it (S2) approaches it at a distance of 3-4 Neptune orbit radii IIRC. I seem to remember once calculating the g force experienced by the star and getting something close to the moon's surface gravity, but that was when the hole was 2.6 Msun.
Are we the pearl or the grit?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"The BBC are reporting that a German team has confirmed the existence of a Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the center of the Milky Way, using the 3.5m Starscream and the 8.2m Megatron (MGTRN) in Chile. Both are operated by the European Southern Observatory (Eso). The black hole is 397,820,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times heavier than an autobot, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal. According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that Optimus and Ultra Magnus forms into Omega Prime."
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We're all gonna be a lot thinner!
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
The official release by the ESO is here
Black holes are known to exist in our Galaxy, M31, and NGC 4258. The evidence for black holes is usually provided by ruling out all the other possibilities. An excellent example paper (for M31) is here: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0509839 Actually the slashdot.org crowd could look here for the most relevant science papers on astrophysics: http://xxx.lanl.gov/list/astro-ph/new The people working on this ESO project are all brilliant astronomers.
/golf clap
Well-played, sir.
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Hey, that's just the answer that I got!
I also came up with an average density of just over 1.16 kg/cc or 41.7 lb/cubic inch. That doesn't sound so bad!
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
... rock and paper are the ones fucking each other while scissors just gets to play pranks ...
Stop it! You're making me cry!
Wow this is old news. Our galaxy with the black hole center was identified at UCLA years ago; http://www.astro.ucla.edu/research/galcenter/ http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=18712 tag-redundant ;)
Almost 200 years ago Joseph Smith stated that God created worlds without number. The astronomers of that day didn't know that there were 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. They also didn't know that there were more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in the galaxy. Hmmm. More than 100 billion x 100 billion stars. I think that is somewhere around 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. Since our sun has at least 10 planet-like bodies (or worlds) and it is likely that at least one in a hundred stars is like our sun, that would make at least 1x10^24 worlds. A 64-bit integers can go as high as about 2x10^19. It would require an 80-bit integer to accurately count that many worlds, which is not even as big as the number of worlds that there likely are out there. The universe (since the big bang) is only 4.5x10^17 seconds old, which will fit in a 64-bit integer, with plenty of room to spare. Maybe Joseph Smith knew more than most people give him credit for.
Speaking of black holes (I should tie this all together, right?), he also said that there was a place called "Outer Darkness" where Satan would be tossed one day, and he would never be able to escape. That sounds like a black hole to me, and I don't think any astronomers were thinking anything about black holes until many years after Joseph Smith's death.
Makes you wonder just how much WE really do know about the universe, and how much we have YET to learn.
Don't call it a "black" hole. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008/07/11/texas-county-official-sees-race-term-black-hole/
How many Libraries of Congress BIG is it?
Or is it some multiple of Volkswagens?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This is similar to how stars may form around a black hole as well, no?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14582
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
If the connotation is "discovered", as it seems in TFA, then TFA is wrong. If instead it implies the more accurate "providing additional data regarding that which is already known" then it'd be correct.
"Final Proof Provided For Milky Ways Central Black Hole", Space.com, 16 October 2002. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/blackhole_milkyway_021016.html
I can't reach his site now that it's on Discover Magazine's site; does Phil Plait ever take astronomers and/or "real" science media to task for doing and/or reporting bad astronomy? What TFA does provide is an improved estimate for the mass: 4 million suns vs. 2.6 million from the 2002 data.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I suspect the Great Space Oyster is just plain old Flying Spaghetti Monster in a scientific dress for the masses.
Say, I can't understand this without a car analogy. Are you telling us that the black hole is like a drug dealer's Hummer? Or is it like a supermodel's Ferrari? Or is it like a two year old Volvo?
all our credit went ?
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
... now I feel like I'm being flushed down a toilet.
...and I will nominate your post as Most Humorous Post That Is Mocking A Bad Science Analogy.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
the Great Space Oyster
Uh-oh. I don't think the Flying Spaghetti Monster is going to like this.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I guess Jack Sparrow will go after the perl aye?
Multidimensional compression due to intense and increasing effects of gravitation. ...So, if we were being sucked into a black hole, would every object in the universe appear to be moving away from us.
If the source of the gravity was sufficiently large would it appear that the effect locally would be minuscule, while causing us to believe in a non steady state every expanding universe because all distant observable phenomena appear to be moving away from us?
Is it possible that the redshifts in the spectra are caused by us speeding away from the light as the space we are occupying gets stretched and twisted by gravity due to the effects of a spinning black hole?
Just a thought.
Oh well. 'Guess it's time to nail everything down.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Interesting, it has taken 45 years to prove what Isaac Asimov knew when he wrote his Foundation series.
Um... duh? I thought we knew this like thirty years ago.
but if God created circular logic...
we ARE all going to die ...
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)