Watch: Nobel Prize-winning efforts show stars orbiting the black hole at the center of our galaxy

Watch: Nobel Prize-winning efforts show stars orbiting the black hole at the center of our galaxy

An illustration depicting the orbits of the stars that encircle the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. | ESO/L. Calçada/spaceengine.org

The astronomers who observed them just won a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Scientists can’t see the supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. But they can sense the enormous gravitational power it has on the stars around it. Stars, which astronomers can see, orbit the black hole, at staggering speeds.

See for yourself. This video includes 16 years of observations from the European Southern Observatory. This isn’t an animation — it’s real images of stars sped up by a factor of 32 million. Watch them dance around a mysterious blank center.

A video of real images of stars sped up by a factor of 32 million.ESO/MPE

And here’s a cleaner, illustrated version of similar observations, from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

On Tuesday, Andrea Ghez, an astronomer at UCLA, and Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and UC Berkeley, shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for leading teams who made these extraordinary observations captured over three decades. (Ghez made them at the Keck Observatory, and Genzel led the European effort.) Ghez is now the fourth woman to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

“Stretching the limits of technology, [Ghez and Genzel] refined new techniques to compensate for distortions caused by the Earth’s atmosphere, building unique instruments and committing themselves to long-term research,” the Nobel Committee writes. “Their pioneering work has given us the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.”

Ghez and Genzel share this year’s prize with Roger Penrose, an emeritus professor at Oxford, who theorized that the existence of black holes is compatible with Einstein’s theory of gravity.

“Einstein did not himself believe that black holes really exist,” the Nobel Committee writes. “In January 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death, Roger Penrose proved that black holes really can form and described them in detail; at their heart, black holes hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease. His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.”

Ghez and Genzel also proved in their work how Einstein’s theory of gravity is fundamentally correct.

Star S2, which is marked in the video above with a yellow line, is around 15 times as massive as our sun. But it’s nothing compared with the black hole, which is estimated to be some 4 million times more massive than our sun. The gravity it produces whips S2’s orbit to around 11 million miles per hour, which is about 200 times the speed the Earth orbits around the sun. S2 completes one orbit in around 16 Earth years.

Recently, both Genzel’s and Ghez’s teams witnessed S2 passing by Sagittarius A* at a speed greater than 15.5 million miles per hour. That’s more than 4,300 miles every second, or nearly 3 percent of the speed of light. S2 completes its orbit around the black hole in just 16 years, which allows these teams of astronomers to precisely compare the predictions of Einstein’s gravitational theory of something orbiting such a massive black hole with actual observations, proving the theory is watertight.

All the work awarded with the Nobel Prize Tuesday laid the groundwork for scientists to peer even deeper and closer at the black holes that live at the center of galaxies. In 2019, a worldwide effort called the Event Horizon Telescope published the first ever, up-close image of a black hole (the center of the Messier 87 galaxy). In the coming years, they may also resolve an image of the mysterious, powerful Sagittarius A* at the center of our own galaxy. And finally, we’ll see the source of all this gravitational power.


Help keep Vox free for all

Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

Author: Brian Resnick

Read More

RSS
Follow by Email