Posted on 11/02/2005 1:03:25 PM PST by Abathar
LONDON (Reuters) - Chinese scientists said on Wednesday they had gathered evidence that shows a giant object in the center of our galaxy is a super-massive black hole.
Zhi-Qiang Shen and researchers at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory captured radio waves emitted just beyond the edge of the mysterious object, known as Sagittarius A, with a system of 10 radio telescopes spread across the United States.
In a report in the science journal Nature they said it "provides strong evidence that Sgr A is a super-massive black hole."
The celestial objects that suck in everything around them including light are among the most mysterious objects in the universe. They are formed when matter from a dying star collapses under its own gravity.
Black holes have been described as the ultimate victory over gravity because of their ability to suck in stars and other galactic features.
Scientists have long suspected the presence of a black hole in the center of the Galaxy. Astronomers believe it is four million times more massive than our Sun.
The research reported in Nature suggests the black hole is as wide as the radius of the Earth's orbit.
"These observations provide strong evidence that Sgr A is indeed a black hole, and afford a glimpse of the behavior of the matter that is about to flow into it," said Christopher Reynolds, of the University of Maryland in the United States, in a commentary in the journal.
He described the findings as a further step toward capturing an image of the shadow around the edge of a black hole, which would be a classic test of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.
The theory predicts that massive bodies -- planets, stars or black holes -- actually twist time and space around as they spin.
That's pretty darn big by anyones standards.
"The research reported in Nature suggests the black hole is as wide as ....." Insert your own joke here.
They've named it Ted Kennedy.AWB
That's pretty darn big by anyones standards.
Yeah, that really sucks.
Good to see something getting outsourced from China to the USA for a change.
That is a big door as Bridges said in Tron.
ok...how long do we have?
..."Sgr A is indeed a black hole"...
Another case of racist profiling. Bastards.
God is great, he let's us find awesome stuff as a reminder of how little we truly are in His creation.
Can we do anything about it?
No. So what is the big deal?
Dawrin that.
Not touching that with a ten foot ... never mind.
Enough time for a kegger?
Star Jones? Maxine Waters? Shirley Jackson Lee?
hard to even fathom . . .
While news of this event has been on the horizon a while, discovering this black hole is a singularity occurrence.
You saw "Tron"?
I thought I was the only person who saw that.
I hope the Chinese now have plans to invade and occupy their new discovery.
. . . . as wide as my mother-in-law's bloomers.
DA740
The math doesn't quite work out. A sphere that is the diameter of the earth's orbit would have approximately 8 million times the volume of the sun. (the sun has a radius of about a half million miles and the earth's orbit is about 100 million miles radius. The ratio of two spheres of these diameters is about 200^3, or 8 million.) If the black hole has only four million times the mass of the sun, it would be half as dense as the sun. Black holes are actually much more dense than the sun.
Yeah. I even knew what TRON meant since I had my Vic-20 by then. 7 kilobytes of program memory with the expansion module!
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