Mega-Telescope Net To Stare Down Massive Black Hole At Center of Milky Way

Scientists are setting up a super-telescope-network to study Sagittarius A*, the suspected black hole at the center of our galaxy.  It's eight terra-yotta-kilograms , aka "so vast we don't even have prefixes that high", four million solar masses.  So why is it so hard to see?  Well, it's buried behind half a galaxy's worth of light-emitting stars, interstellar dust over thirty thousand light years kind of reduces the signal, and - minor issue - black holes eat light.  Which makes things trickier.

Luckily astronomer Shep Doeleman of MIT remembers Voltron, and realized that if one telescope isn't enough, you just plug more of them together until it works.  The technique is called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, VLBI, and it effectively creates a vast virtual dish as big as the distance between the telescopes - and he's using telescopes all over the planet.

The second part of his strategy is tuning the telescopes to 1 mm radiation, which is not as strongly absorbed by the half-a-galaxy's worth of junk between us and the action.  And what action it is - if we can observe Sagittarius A*'s surroundings we can confirm once and for all whether it's a black hole - and prove Einstein right (or wrong!)

Relativity describes how large masses can bend space, and a black hole is where the mass is so large that space gives up altogether and becomes a singularity.  Black holes are already well understood, we think, but we've only ever observed them at second hand - the behavior of orbiting objects or bent light rays.  To actually view the shadow of a black hole, the cut-off point where light is swallowed and cannot escape, would be a massive advance - and only the beginning.

Detailed observation of the area around the Sag A* border would be a goldmine of information. The spin and rate of matter inflow into the central black hole will tell us about the Milky Way's creation, as well as providing further extreme tests of general relativity.  We could even see frame dragging, which sounds like a video game hardware issue but is actually something that could happen to reality - where a spinning black hole grabs hold of space and literally pulls reality around after it.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Watch this space.  This filled-with-spacetime-traumatising-cosmological-events space

Related Galaxy posts:

18 Billion Suns -A Galaxy Classic: Biggest Black Hole in Universe Discovered—and it’s BIG
Neutron Stars: New Discovery Proves Einstein's Space-Time Predictions
Mystery Neutron Star Discovered
Andromeda Galaxy & Its Mystery Core: Destined to Merge With the Milky Way?
Neutron Stars & The Physics of Star Trek
New, Revised Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Black Holes Key to Mapping the Evolution of the Universe

Comments

[John Davis]

Wow, truly amazing. They should fly the Hubble into a black hole when they retire it! That would be cool!

RT
www.privacy-center.vze.com

[ankit]

i agree ... if we can fly hubble that far, sending it into the black hole and looking at the last received images would indeed be amazing

[Rob]

With our fastest rockets it would take almost a million years for anything sent from Earth to reach the center of the galaxy.

[Shmeeg]

I don't think they mean Sag A*...

Sending Hubble into a black hole would be the ultimate recycling :D

Would have to have a second rocket beyond the border to capture what Hubble looks like flying into the Black Hole though.

[claudio]

The article seems to relate to "discovery of the hot water".

Sagittarius A is our main black hole situated in the Milkyway galaxy center and has been observed quite extensively (see picures at Spitzer and Hubble sites...see also Chandra site).

It is indeed possible that we will know more about weight and dimensions when the new generation of clustered multispectral telescopes will be operational....even if we are in a periphery branch of the M-way and the galaxy center is covered to us by supermassive interstellar clouds.

On the other hand the Hubble has recently undergone a complete overhauling...do'nt you know ????

This means that if such a 'risky human mission' has been undertaken Hubble is far away from being dead or ready to be swallowed by a massive B-hole as a reader has said.

Regards to Sagittarius A that keep our galaxy together