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."
I was more surprised that no one jumped on the statement: "four million times heavier than our sun".
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
You mean how it should read "four million times as massive"? Because you know, everything weighs more near a black hole... Even light.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
are black holes really still considered theoretical constructs? ... I thought many scientific articles bring up black holes now and then without questioning, anyway.
Black holes do have a solid foundation in theory, and we can observe the gravitational effects they have on their neighbours. However, as far as I know, Hawking radiation is the only way to detect them directly and I don't think that this has been observed.
The authors of this article are showing observational evidence for a supermassive (millions of solar masses) black hole in the centre of our Galaxy - something that was thought to be at the centre of many galaxies but was still in open question. The observations made during this study have shown that our Galaxy has one, using techniques that are not an option for galaxies further away, thus giving us the best evidence that supermassive black holes exist.
That's the nature of an unobservable object. All you can do is infer its existence through its effects on other objects, in this case through the gravitational effects on stars. But then all you've *proven* is that something is causing those effects. The simplest explanation is a black hole, but it could be something else, and that's why black holes are still considered theoretical.
Dark matter is in the same boat. Same with dark energy and strings. Physics seems to be moving toward explanations involving unobservable objects, whether that's right or not remains to be seen. Question is, can it ever be seen? See?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
> Ya know all of this would be so easy if someone invented a chronoscope to view past time periods (reference Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past"). Then instead of guessing what happened 10 billion years ago, we could just look and see with our own eyes.
We have such a thing, but we call it a 'telescope' instead of a chronoscope. Want to know what happened 10 billion years ago? Just look at something 10 billion lightyears away (or at least, something that was 10 billion lightyears away 10 billion years ago).
That's the nature of an unobservable object. All you can do is infer its existence through its effects on other objects, in this case through the reflective effects on sunlight. But then all you've *proven* is that something is causing those effects. The simplest explanation is the moon, but it could be something else, and that's why the moon is still considered theoretical.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Both of those guys plenty of observational and/or experimental evidence that supported what they claimed.
The whole 'A new theory still being explored is that each galaxy has two black holes. One is intake and one is output.' has neither.
It'd be interesting if it did, but some work in the backyard with a mid-sized telescope can poke some pretty serious holes in the idea.
But on a deep level, that true of every object. I can only infer the existence of this pen through the effects of light that is (theoretically) reflected off it and absorbed by my retinas, and through the effects it has on the various nerve receptors in my skin. The simplest explanation is a pen, but it could be something else (impluses fed to a brain in a vat, the dream of a butterfly).
So at what point do we consider a thing no longer theoretical.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
One of the reasons is the average portion size has increased.
;) ).
Two "asian sized" people can share one US sized meal and still be rather full at the end.
If you keep finishing double sized portions (or at least attempting to finish), you're more likely to grow bigger.
Bonus growth for snacking and drinking large sugary drinks (huge lattes, smoothies etc) between those huge meals.
I think drinking large sugary drinks to quench your thirst is also a big problem. I doubt it's easy for your body to absorb just the water and let the sugar stay in your stomach and pass out in your feces (well it might be easier if you have bacteria that help
If vast quantities of sugar enter your bloodstream, and you don't burn it up by being active (or super inefficient) then either it gets stored ASAP as fat, or you effectively have type II diabetes.
Good points.
Also, magic genies that come out of bottles can probably move you between two points in space faster than light would travel without actually violating any laws of physics.
I am pretty sure that Santa Claus also moves faster than light, in order to travel to all houses in the world in the span of 24 hours, so perhaps scientists can figure out a way to harness Santa Claus technology and solve this problem.
There may be a few other ways to travel faster than light that both you and I have missed. It's really hard keeping track of absurdities, don't you agree?
Why limit your imagination to wormholes and other pseudoscience fantasy constructs?
I think that if we're going to design any such kind of "travel", it will be accomplished by magic spells. Scientists right now ought to be working on coming up with the right incantations, don't you agree?
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.