massive blackholes

1 year ago
7

Using one of the largest telescopes in the world ("Very Large Telescope", or "VLT"), astronomers found a star that "dances" around a black hole in the Milky Way, forming the pattern of a rosette.

The movement of the S2 star around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A * at the center of the Milky Way proved that Albert Einstein was right about gravity once again. The images prove predictions made by Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, published in 1915, the foundation of modern physics.

The S2 star surrounds the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way once every 16 years. For almost 30 years, astronomers have been observing it to accurately trace its circular orbit.

This rosette-shaped orbit occurs thanks to the “amplification” of an effect due to the enormous gravity of the black hole. This effect, known as Schwarzchild's precession, had never been measured before in a star orbiting a supermassive black hole.

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