American - Scientist | June 16, 1965 -
As an astronomer, I get to ignore the details of the things that we don't understand. There's a lot of work that we can do on scales that we do understand, and there is actually a finite size that I can associate with a super massive black hole.
Andrea M. Ghez
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The key to proving that there's a black hole is showing that there's a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars. The way the star moves around the center of the galaxy is very much like the way the planets orbit the sun.
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Our galaxy's pretty ordinary, garden-variety. So if we believe our galaxy has a super massive black hole, that tells us that most, if not all, galaxies host such a black hole at their centers.
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There's a large cluster of stars that are orbiting the center of our galaxy. And by measuring the motion of stars, and in particular, their orbits, we can figure out whether or not there's a central black hole.
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One of the key differences between galaxies with super massive black holes is whether or not the black holes are lit up, because they are basically bingeing on a lot of material in its surroundings.
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Proof of the black hole is a tremendous amount of mass inside a very small volume. There's 4 million times the mass of our sun within a region that's comparable to the size of our solar system.
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Astronomers are obsessed with building larger and larger telescopes. There are two promises that we make with bigger telescopes: that they can see fainter things and that they see more detail. But it's been really hard to follow through on that second promise because of atmospheric distortion.
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The atmosphere is great for people - it allows us to survive - but it's a real headache for astronomers.
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