Black Hole found in Milky Way

article written by TW.

From the BBC News website:

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 the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

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

You can read more on the BBC site (I cant find any other links about it yet)

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6 Responses to “Black Hole found in Milky Way”

  1. Michael Windows Server 2003 Mozilla Firefox 3.0.4 wrote:

    Well to be precise, they tracked the motion of the stars and based on a model of the cosmos, were left with no other explanation than it being due to a black hole.

    Which is not the same thing as ‘confirming’ one exists in the centre of the Milky Way.

    This comment was written at December 10th, 2008 at 0:49,

  2. Florist San Diego Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 3.0.4 wrote:

    Amazing really, if indeed this is true it would be great to see what research we can do on it since it’s in our own galaxy. :shock:

    This comment was written at December 10th, 2008 at 20:33,

  3. Kilgore Trout Windows Vista Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6 wrote:

    I could be wrong here but there probably isn’t much news about it because I think this has been known by astronomers for a long time. It’s thought that there are probably large black holes at the center of most galaxies.

    This comment was written at December 11th, 2008 at 20:35,

  4. TW Windows Vista Mozilla Firefox 3.0.4 wrote:

    Very true – it is interesting as to why the BBC chose to “headline” it on Tuesday though, as it really doesn’t seem to add anything to the sum of human knowledge. Maybe it was a REALLY slow news day…

    This comment was written at December 11th, 2008 at 20:45,

  5. Kilgore Trout Windows Vista Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6 wrote:

    I didn’t read the article, can I assume they just refined exactly how massive it is and/or found further supporting evidence.

    This comment was written at December 11th, 2008 at 21:33,

  6. TW Windows Vista Mozilla Firefox 3.0.4 wrote:

    Sort of. This seems to be the crux of the news item:

    The researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany said the black hole was 27,000 light years, or 158 thousand, million, million miles from the Earth.

    “Undoubtedly the most spectacular aspect of our 16-year study, is that it has delivered what is now considered to be the best empirical evidence that super-massive black holes do really exist,” said Professor Reinhard Genzel, head of the research team.

    “The stellar orbits in the galactic centre show that the central mass concentration of four million solar masses must be a black hole, beyond any reasonable doubt.”

    This comment was written at December 11th, 2008 at 21:37,