Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Black hole confirmed in center of Milky Way.

Well, it's good to hear the phrase "slowly spiraling toward imminent doom and destruction" not in conjunction with the economy... From BBC:

There is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a study has confirmed.

German astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way, using two telescopes in Chile.

The black hole is four million times more massive than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

Black holes are objects whose gravity is so great that nothing - including light - can escape them.

According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

thanks! one of my students is obsessed with black holes so i printed this out for him.