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."
Here is the press release from ESO
Yes, they are. We still have no proof of their actual existence.
For the mass of the Sun the event horizon is approximately 3 km, and for that of the Earth about 9 mm.
That means the entire mass of the sun or the earth, if compressed down into a black hole, would have a radius of 3km or 9mm, respectively. The rest of your post is very silly and doesn't seem to be based on any facts or reputable research/researchers. :(
You're not going to be happy with the new generation of telescopes then. First of all there's the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). What could be bigger than that? Wait for it ... the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) of course!
Are we on the same plane as the accretion disk?
Yes.
How close are we to the event horizon? How close is the sun to the event horizon?
Far. 40-50 thousand light years.
Is it possible to collect and examine the radiation from black hole by approaching it from the "top"?
Yes, hypothetically. However, the black hole is not "feeding" at the moment, meaning there is not much radiation coming from it. If it were in full quasar mode, we would have identified it a long, long time ago.
An analogy is a lot like a tangerine, in that you have to break through the tough outer rind of legitimacy before you get to the juicy center and realize that an analogy can never serve as real evidence in support of anything.
No. In scientific terminology religion would be an "interpretation", in the way that the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many Worlds interpretation are interpretations of QM. It's non-falsifiable, but helps some people cope.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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
That's the nature of an unobservable object.
I wouldn't say a black hole is "unobservable". It emits no light, but has a measurable gravitational field. Conversely consider something like light, which has no mass but can be measured by its electromagnetic interaction (e.g. using a camera).
Different subatomic particles interact in different ways. Four fundamental forces have been identified: electromagnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear, and gravitational. A particular particle may interact via 1 or more of these modes. Just because it is "invisible" with respect to a given force does not make it "unobservable": as long as it interacts via at least one force, it can be measured/observed using that force.
All the examples you've given are of things that are observable: black holes and dark matter and dark energy are all observable via the gravitational effects they produce. Just because they are not observable via light doesn't make them unobservable. (Strictly black holes do emit low-levels of measurable radiation (Hawking radiation), and could also be detected in this way.) The "strings" of string theory (if they exist) should in principle be measurable by studying the interactions of particles via the four forces (whether or not we will ever achieve the energy scales required to do so is a separate question). For that matter it is difficult to "see" air, but it is easy to observe/measure it in other ways.
You have falsely equated "interact strongly via the electromagnetic force" to "observable". It's a natural mistake for humans, since our visual sense is so well-developed. However just because it is invisible to our eyes does not make it an "unobservable object". A truly "unobservable object" would be one which doesn't interact via any force. Such an object isn't merely "unobservable", it is simply "nonexistent" by any physical definition (since it cannot interact with anything else in the universe).