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During a starry night in the southern hemisphere, you can directly see the center of the Milky Way, and that is why you can see many more stars there compared to the northern hemisphere.
For a long time, astronomers suspected that a supermassive black hole lurked there, as many other galaxies had been found to have such black holes in the center. And black holes left clear footprints, especially in young galaxies. Massive black holes in young galaxies are the worst of the black holes.
Hell’s carousel nurtures the hole
Around the holes, a disk of hot gas and dust spins like a carousel from hell and nurtures the black hole. The system generates so much energy that two jets radiate at the “poles” of the black hole, and these jets reveal that there is something extraordinary here.
But the supposed black hole in our own middle-aged galaxy, the Milky Way, appeared to be a much more controlled black hole. So how could one detect it?
Dance of slow death to the event horizon
A black hole is not a vacuum cleaner that quickly sucks up everything in its path. Matter is caught in a slow, deadly dance around the hole, before finally falling over the edge, which is called the event horizon. After that, there is no going back.
During the 1990s, both Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez made careful observations of stars caught in an elliptical death march toward the black hole. These two stars were so close to the black hole that they circled the Milky Way in just 16 years. (Compare to our own sun, which takes 200 million years to orbit the Milky Way.)
Powerful flash
I did an interview with Reinhard Genzel in 1999 regarding him presenting his observations of the stars around the Milky Way’s black hole. He then said that it is a very unusual event to see a star fall. But when it happens, it doesn’t happen silently. The “Fall of the Star” would generate an enormous energy development, visually in the form of a powerful flash.
Based on the movement patterns of the stars, today’s new Nobel laureates could calculate that there should be a heavy object inside it, which does not emit any light. But something is hiding there and it is heavy. The mass corresponds to four million solar masses in an area as large as our solar system. If it is not a black hole, what is it?
Mathematically friendly
The third winner is Roger Penrose, who receives half the prize for developing mathematics that proves the existence of black holes. He is considered one of the great geniuses of our time and, in fact, many also thought that he should have received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011. At that time, Daniel Shechtman was rewarded for the discovery of quasicrystals, similar to what is known as a Penrose tile pattern. developed mathematically as early as the 70s.
Many were waiting today for an award for the first image on the distorted event horizon of a black hole. Instead, this year’s physics award went to the discovery that black holes really exist and that a supermassive black hole rules in the middle of our own galaxy.
