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
... 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.
God is Netcraft?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
>God is Netcraft?
ahem...Netcraft confirms it! :-)
/. zen: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters...
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
No. The big crunch model used to be popular (quite some time ago) but the current best evidence supports a runaway universe fated for a "big chill". At the end of time you and I will not be as one, we'll be unimaginably far apart from each other.... Thankfully.
So God's in the black hole or what ?
"What does God, need with a spaceship?"
couldn't help it.
I'm inclined to believe it'll be cold and lonely.
It's theorized that the gravitational pull of a blackhole -- although incredibly strong immediately near it -- is severely limited in range. (comparatively speaking). It isn't unlike our own solar orbit. Sure, we gravitate around the sun, but we're slowly moving away from it. Granted, there are other reasons for that, but it shows you what little influence gravity has to 'pull' something toward it.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
So does this discovery change the odds for the universe ending in a heat death or a big crunch?
No, they already knew it was there. The problems in cosmology are also unlikely to be solved by finding a piece of missing mass, as were currently about 625% short by mass and
if galaxies are more likely to form around black holes
This is a chicken and egg problem. Do stars form galaxies or do galaxies form stars?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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.
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.
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.
I don't think that's right. Galaxies ARE formed OF stars. Think of a shallow sea (the universe). As it dries out you get isolated puddles. Those puddles are galaxies, but they are formed of water (stars). The word galaxy is only a collective noun.
Surely from what we know, stellar objects coalesce from clouds of gas, and a galaxy is therefore somewhat similar to a solar system where the most massive object is at the centre, merely because it has coalesced more. Naturally it becomes the centre. It would follow then that the stars in galaxies are the smaller coalescences surrounding the black hole which is naturally the most massive. For all we know, all the galaxies are lesser coalescences in the universe, which in turn is a lesser coalescence in the whatever. Maybe it is all fractal.
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."
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?
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
That's always made me wonder what room is left for religion; if every particle in the universe is scattered beyond imagination from each other, does that mean God can even exist? Or does God exist outside of the universe? What about us, in the context of our souls? If souls exist, will they be ripped apart, as well?
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
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!
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.
Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces of Nature -- ElectroMagnetism, Weak Nuclear Force, Strong Nuclear Force, Gravity. Even with the entire mass of the Earth pulling on a paper-clip all it takes is a wittle tiny ant to overcome that gravity and pick it up off the ground. I heard this on Nova which really put it in perspective how weak gravity is, relatively speaking.
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."
Actually, it's also four million times heavier too. Weight and mass are not the same thing, but everything has both. Naturally mass always remains fixed, while weight varies depending on what body is attracting it. HOWEVER, when expressed as a factor, weight remains constant too. So while 100lbs of nails won't remain constant on all planets, saying that 100lbs of nails will always weight twice as much as 50 lbs WILL remain constant so long as they're both being attracted by the same object (and for weight to have any meaning that's a given). And it just so happens that the ratio of weights between objects is the same is the ratio of mass between objects.
SOOOO, long story short, if the object is 4 million times as massive as the sun, then it is effectively also 4 million times heavier as well.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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."
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 ;)
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!
Yeah, I understand all that, and honestly I did not see the other posts or I wouldn't have posted. I guess I do not get the point of discussing the weight of something that massive. Weight is the measurement of the force of gravity or acceleration (relativity speaking) on a given mass, therefore the weight is variable depending on the strength of the that force, and in the context of a planet, star or black hole is really quite meaningless.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
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
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?
Just to be pedantic, an objects weight is also relative to its orientation to the object that is attracting it, or more specifically the orentation of the two attracting objects to each other. Mass is not effected in this way.
For instance, a tall building has a weight different than that same amount of mass laying on its side, or all in a perfect sphere assuming these objects are all at the same distance from the other object (or planet). The tall building 'weighs' less because the gravitational forces on the mass at the top of the building (or the point furthest from the other object) is lower than it is at the bottom of the building (or surface of the planet). This difference is minor at the scale we deal with on Earth, and if you're talking about something thats basically a sphere such as a planet or star it has little effect at all. Its just important to note that the relationship between mass and weight is only the same in a certain specific circumstance, specifically when all objects are perfect spheres of matching density. If two objects have a shape other than a perfect sphere or different densities, the ratio of weight and mass are no longer aligned and depend on the orentation or density.
An object the size of the moon with a mass of X and a weight of 10 pounds, when laying on the surface of the earth, would weigh more than 10 pounds if it had the same mass in the size of a bowling ball. The moon sized object would be effected by less gravity at the top, centrifigal forces of the rotation of the planet, and all sorts of other things that real physists would love to tell you about.
In short, while you may observe that mass and weight are consistently proportional, this is simply due to inaccurate measurements on your part, not because they are actually proportional.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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
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
Um... duh? I thought we knew this like thirty years ago.
but if God created circular logic...