Star Clinches Case for Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole

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The discovery of a star orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy provides compelling evidence that a supermassive black hole lurks there, according to a new study. Previous research had pointed to the presence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, but the observations could still be explained by other theories. Now findings published in the journal Nature all but rule out those alternate theories, scientists say.
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Using 10 years of high-resolution images collected by telescopes around the world, a team of astronomers led by Rainer Schödel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany tracked a star as it moved around the astrophysical object known as Sagittarius A (SgrA*) at our galaxy's core. The star, dubbed S2 came closest to SgrA* last spring, when it was 17 light-hours (or three times the distance from the sun to Pluto) away from SgrA*, which acts as a compact source of radio waves. S2 completes its orbit in 15.2 years and travels nearly 200 times as fast as the Earth moves around the sun, the researchers found. "We are now able to demonstrate with certainty that SgrA* is indeed the location of the central dark mass we knew existed," Schödel says. "Even more important, our new data have 'shrunk' by a factor of several thousand the volume within which those several million solar masses are contained." (The most recent model calculations estimate that the black hole's mass is roughly 2.6 million times that of the sun.)

According to the report, the new results eliminate the possibility that a compact cluster of neutron stars, a stellar-size black hole or low mass stars could be responsible for the radio waves emanating from SgrA*. In theory, SgrA* could be a hypothetical star comprised of elementary particles known as bosons. But as study co-author Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute points out, "even if such a boson star is in principle possible, it would rapidly collapse into a supermassive black hole anyhow." --Sarah Graham

Source: Scientific American
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0007BAC3-CD4F-1DAD-94E2809EC5880108
 
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem sad or tough
And people are useless, or obnoxious, or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite enough...


Verse 1:

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
revolving at nine-hundred miles an hour
and orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
a sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are moving a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles an hour
of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Verse 2:

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred million stars,
it's a hundred thousand light-years side to side,
it bulges in the middle, sixty thousand light-years thick,
but out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thiry thousand light-years from galactic central point
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
and our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions in this
Amazing and Expanding Universe!

Verse 3:

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
in all of the directions it can whiz,
as fast as it can go, the speed of light, y'know,
twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is,
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.

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