Supermassive Black Hole Resides At The Center Of Our Milky Way

MessageToEagle.com – Gaseous clouds, spinning around the assumed black hole at the heart of the Milky Way at a speed of around 30 percent of the speed of light, have been spotted by researchers using the ESO’s GRAVITY-VLTI.

The observations confirmed bright flares of infrared radiation coming from the accretion disk of Sagittarius A*, a belt of gas orbiting at relativistic speeds.

‘It is mind boggling to actually witness material orbiting a massive black hole at 30 per cent of the speed of light’, marvels Oliver Pfuhl, postdoctoral researcher at the MPE.

‘GRAVITY and its tremendous sensitivity allowed us to observe the accretion processes in real-time at unprecedented detail.’

The gas is moving in a circular orbit outside the innermost stable path and can be identified through radiation bursts in the infrared range.

ESO’s GRAVITY instrument confirms black hole status of the Milky Way centre / scientist from the University of Cologne contributed the decisive instruments

‘The heart pieces of GRAVITY were built in Cologne. These are two spectrometers that connect the light beams of the four gigantic 8.2 m diameter telescopes and thus create a giant telescope of more than 130m diameter,’ Prof. Andreas Eckart, who led  the infrared group at the Physics Institute I of the University of Cologne, informed in a press release.

Dr. Straubmeier also from the University of Cologne said that “GRAVITY’s measuring accuracy is so high that you can read off the time on a kitchen clock located on the moon.”

The observations confirmed exactly the theoretical predictions for such hot spots orbiting at the innermost edge of stable orbits around a black hole with a mass of four million solar masses.

‘This always was one of our dream projects but we did not dare to hope that it would become possible, so soon and so clear.’ Referring to the belief that Sagittarius A* is a supermassive black hole, Genzel concluded that ‘the result is a resounding confirmation of the massive black hole paradigm,’ explained Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany.

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