There is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a study has confirmed.

German astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way, using two telescopes in Chile.

The black hole is four million times more massive than our Sun...(about 1391980 km)...according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7774287.stm

Erm... yea.. Most astrophysicists believe that there's a giant black hole at the center of -every- galaxy.... And that is why it's a galaxy, instead of the stars all just drifting off..

break19

I think he means they've actually observed the hole. I'll read the article later, but being pretty sure of something and actually observing it are two different things.

Silly Chaos, they haven't observed the hole, that's impossible. They cant "observe" something that sucks all light.
They think there is one because of "the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way".

What they've done isn't so much a discovery, as it is a refinement. They've confirmed that the central mass is so concentrated that there are no known possibilities that can explain it besides a supermassive black hole. They've also managed to locate the center of the galaxy with much higher accuracy. What is new and exciting is that they can now use the orbital plots, in conjunction with an expanded array of telescopes, to do direct testing of Einstein's theories in an environment we can't replicate on Earth.

They might also get a picture of a Great Old One with its pants down.

Maybe it's the Grox.

I can directly observe the black hole with my chaos sense.

Imagine that; a study confirms the existence of something based on the presence of something which has never been confirmed to exist, except of course in that study. Logic lol!

Stephen thinks black holes radiate.

Actually, it's the basis of (one of) his bets with Kip Thorne of Caltech. Black holes have "hair."

It has to do with quantum mechanics, and so-called "vacuum energy." At the quantum level, subatomic particles are popping in and out of existence, and they do this in pairs.

Since these particles must sometimes pop into existence near the black hole's event horizon, it stands to reason that eventually a pair will pop into existence with one of the pair inside the event horizon, and one outside the event horizon. The pair inside the event horizon cannot escape, and a percentage of the other particles stream off into space, creating what is now called "Hawking Radiation." To an outside observer, it looks like the black hole is emitting a VERY feeble radiation.

This radiation carries with it a miniscule amount of the black hole's mass/energy. So that, when the known universe has run down and there are no more stars, protons are no longer stable, and nothing exists besides black holes, they will still radiate a feeble energy for trillions of years, until the last black hole peters out and the universe becomes a bleak, thin broth of vacuum energy, a couple quadrillion years from now.

Only then will Led Zeppelin reunite.

Very sad.

Also, very interesting, I had never heard of this.