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At the heart of our galaxy is a giant black hole. That is why a star travels in a special way, and therefore supports Einstein’s famous theory. This was demonstrated with a measurement of more than two and a half decades.
A representation of the Schwarzschild precession provided by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). It proves for the first time Einstein’s forecast that the orbits of the celestial bodies rotate gradually, that is, around the point where the respective celestial body orbits.
(sda / dpa)
The rapid dance of a star in the center of our Milky Way provides unprecedented confirmation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: the star runs around the gigantic black hole at the heart of our native galaxy on a path in the form of rosette, as decades of precision measurements demonstrate. The measurements corresponded exactly to Einstein’s theory, reports a research team led by Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching near Munich in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics”.
The general theory of relativity predicts that the orbits of the heavenly bodies will gradually rotate around the point where the respective heavenly bodies orbit. Since the orbits are generally not perfect circles, but rather ellipses, the shape of a rosette gradually emerges from the ellipse which rotates a little with each orbit.
This generally very small effect was first measured on the planet Mercury, whose orbit revolves around the sun. With a series of observations that lasted nearly 30 years, researchers have demonstrated this so-called perihelion rotation, also known as the Schwarzschild precession, for the first time on a star around a supermassive black hole, the central black hole of our Milky Way galaxy, found in the constellation Sagittarius. and carries the astronomical name Sgr A *.
A year that lasts 16 years.
“This breakthrough through observations supports the evidence that Sgr A * must be a supermassive black hole four million times the mass of the sun,” Genzel explained in a communication from the European Southern Observatory That, with its “Very Large Telescope” Observations have been made. The observed star with the designation S2 runs around the black hole at a distance of less than 20 billion km, which is about 120 times the distance from Earth to the sun, and reaches up to a third the speed of light.
A star orbit has been around for 16 years. Therefore, long precision measurements were required to accurately determine the orbit of the celestial object, which was about 26,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year.
Unraveling the mystery of dark matter
According to the researchers, the observations also allow us to better estimate how much invisible material in the form of smaller black holes or so-called dark matter is located near the central black hole of our galaxy.
Dark matter is one of the greatest puzzles in modern physics: it shows by gravity that it is more than five times more common than matter that is familiar to us. So far, however, researchers have no idea what this issue is. With the next generation of even larger telescopes, astronomers hope to get closer to the mass monster at the heart of the Milky Way.
* DOI Technical Article Number: 10.1051 / 0004-6361 / 202037813
