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A The star is S2, which is part of a star cluster around the Sagittarius A black hole, located 26,000 light-years from the Sun and which will have four million solar masses.
According to the European Southern Observatory, which operates the telescope in Chile with which the observations were made and which today released the results of the investigation in a statement, orbit This star is shaped like a rosette and not an ellipse, as predicted by the classical theory of gravitation of the physicist Isaac Newton, from 1687.
“We discovered that the movement of a star around this black hole is not a orbit closed, that is, it is not a path where the end and the beginning are the same point, described periodically, “said one of the Portuguese researchers involved in the study, Paulo García, from the Center for Astrophysics and Gravitation (Centra) of the Instituto Superior Technician, in Lisbon.
According to Paulo García, who also teaches at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, orbit S2 star “is a rosette path”, a “orbit open, compatible with General Relativity “published by the physicist Albert Einstein in 1915.
The results of the investigation, which involved making precise measurements of orbit of the star for about 30 years from observations made with the telescope VLT, were published in Astronomy & Astrophysics magazine. The work mobilized an international scientific team, namely from Portugal, France and Germany.
In addition to Paulo García, researchers from Centra António Amorim and Vítor Cardoso were also involved.
The Portuguese team participated in more than 330 measurements of the star’s position, which completes a orbit in the surroundings of Sagittarius A after 16 years, but also in the “design and construction” of a component of a telescopic instrument VLT this allows “images to be obtained of the environment near the black hole,” said António Amorim, quoted in a Centra statement.
Paulo García explained to Lusa that the orbit of the star S2, one of the closest to the black hole Sagittarius A “, is associated with the physical mechanism called precession“, which, in this case,” is linked to the spatio-temporal deformation by the black hole. “
Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity describes the deformation of space-time caused by a black hole, an extremely dense and dark body in the center of galaxies from which nothing escapes, not even light.
“The effect of the warping of space-time is ‘pure’ and gives the star an extra pull at the point closest to the black hole, causing orbit don’t go back to the starting point and make the figure of the rose window “, said Paulo García.
According to the professor, the classical theory of gravity, unlike Einstein’s modern one, “cannot explain this phenomenon without invoking a third body (which would be a second black hole) or a cloud of massive dark matter that is unknown.”
However, for the researcher, “however spectacular Whatever general relativity is, most physicists believe this is not the ultimate theory of gravity. “
“Test the theory [de Einstein] at the limit of the immense curvature of space-time, which is the region near the horizon of the black hole ‘supermassive‘ [Sagitário A] in the center of the galaxy [Via Láctea] it’s a way to get to this new physics, “he said.
Therefore, scientists intend to deepen their studies, measuring the orbit S2 star with even higher precisionlooking for stars in orbits closer to Sagittarius A and analyzing what triggers the explosions around the black hole.
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