At the center of our Milky Way galaxy is an as-yet unidentified ?dark mass?. The widely held opinion is that the mass is actually a massive black hole, thought to be at the center of many galaxies. Dr. Tal Alexander, a theoretical astrophysicist, and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Munich, and several institutions in France, made a discovery that goes quite a way towards confirming that opinion.
The discovery, published in the current issue of Nature, constitutes what a Weizmann Institute press release called ?a pioneering achievement?? Through their methodology, the Israeli scientists have introduced high-precision black-hole astronomy that can help scientists better understand how galaxies are born and evolve. The Weizmann Institute astrophysicists managed to track a star, called S2, racing around the ?dark mass? at the center of the galaxy. This provides convincing evidence for the theory that the ?dark mass? is a massive black hole, because, explains Dr. Alexander, ?The black hole's presence is felt by its immense gravitational pull. A star that happens to be close to a supermassive black hole will orbit very rapidly around a point of seemingly empty space.?
Thanks to the pioneering tracking work carried out by the astrophysicists, alternate explanations for the ?dark mass?, such as its being a dense cluster of compact stars or even a giant blob of mysterious subatomic particles, have been debunked. The new detailed analysis of the orbit, made possible by the techniques developed by the team, is fully consistent with the view that the dark mass is a supermassive black hole.
The discovery, published in the current issue of Nature, constitutes what a Weizmann Institute press release called ?a pioneering achievement?? Through their methodology, the Israeli scientists have introduced high-precision black-hole astronomy that can help scientists better understand how galaxies are born and evolve. The Weizmann Institute astrophysicists managed to track a star, called S2, racing around the ?dark mass? at the center of the galaxy. This provides convincing evidence for the theory that the ?dark mass? is a massive black hole, because, explains Dr. Alexander, ?The black hole's presence is felt by its immense gravitational pull. A star that happens to be close to a supermassive black hole will orbit very rapidly around a point of seemingly empty space.?
Thanks to the pioneering tracking work carried out by the astrophysicists, alternate explanations for the ?dark mass?, such as its being a dense cluster of compact stars or even a giant blob of mysterious subatomic particles, have been debunked. The new detailed analysis of the orbit, made possible by the techniques developed by the team, is fully consistent with the view that the dark mass is a supermassive black hole.