Up until this May, 2019, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the Milky Way’s central supermasive black hole appeared like a massive, dormant volcano, a sleeping monster, a slumbering region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that “what goes into them does not come out.”
“We’re so excited, and have been preparing for years to make these measurements,” said Andrea Ghez, who directs the UCLA Galactic Center Group. “For us, it’s visceral, it’s now—but it actually happened 26,000 years ago!” said Andrea Ghez, who directs the UCLA Galactic Center Group about photons from a star known as S0-2 that makes a complete orbit in three dimensions around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way confirming Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The full orbit takes 16 years; the black hole’s mass is about four million times that of the sun.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
Will We Actually Be Able to Detect a Signal from an Alien Intelligence? (Weekend Feature)
Is Something Missing from the Standard Model of the Universe? (Holiday Feature)
Did Water Exist in the Galaxies of the Early Cosmos? (Holiday Feature)
Monster Galaxies at the Dawn of Time
Has Milky Way’s Twin Been Discovered to Will Artificial Intelligence Reveal New Laws of Physics? (The Galaxy Report)
“Alien Habitats Could Be Just About Anywhere”
Was the First Planet Beyond the Milky Way Discovered, or Something Even More Exotic? (Weekend Feature)
“Is Our Universe Extremely Unnatural, a Weird Permutation?” (Weekend Feature)
Eruption from an Object With a Magnetic Field One-Thousand-Trillion Times Stronger than Our Sun’s
