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Originally posted by frey51
- Object SO-45 flys directly past the 'blackhole', but is in no way effected by its gravity. Is this an object that is much farther away thus we are looking through the area where the 'blackhole' is sucking things in? or is it closer to us? I am just confused because, based on my limited knowledge, SO-45 should have been sucked into oblivion, yet it passes right by with no change in eliptical orbit.
Don't forget this is a 2-D projection of 3-D space. If this was 2-D it would have been sucked in, but since it's 3D it could be billions of miles in front of or behind the black hole, when it appears to go right through it.
Originally posted by frey51
- Object SO-45 flys directly past the 'blackhole', but is in no way effected by its gravity. Is this an object that is much farther away thus we are looking through the area where the 'blackhole' is sucking things in? or is it closer to us? I am just confused because, based on my limited knowledge, SO-45 should have been sucked into oblivion, yet it passes right by with no change in eliptical orbit.
Originally posted by Arbitrageur
Very cool animation!
What will all the people that believe black holes are a myth use to explain this?
I'm only as confident as astronomers are, and while they're not 100% confident, they're confident:
Originally posted by zvezdar
Why are you certain the area that those stars are orbiting contains a black hole? You are assuming that is the case.
Astronomers are confident that our own Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, in a region called Sagittarius A*[8] because:
* The star S2 follows an elliptical orbit with a period of 15.2 years and a pericenter (closest distance) of 17 light hours from the center of the central object.[9]
* From the motion of star S2, we estimate the object's mass as 4.1 million solar masses.[10]
* We also know that the radius of the central object is significantly less than 17 light hours, because otherwise, S2 would either collide with it or be ripped apart by tidal forces. In fact, recent observations[11] indicate that the radius is no more than 6.25 light-hours, about the diameter of Uranus' orbit.
* The only known object which can pack 4.1 million solar masses into a volume that small is a black hole.
There are?
All you can determine from the animation is that the stars are orbiting 'something'. There are many different theories for what that 'something' is.