New Insights Into Massive Black Hole Surroundings

[telfrow]

<font color="yellow">UCLA astronomers can determine, for the first time, orbits of massive young stars located a few light months from the enormous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy — stars that hold an imprint of how they were born. <br /><br />The origin of young stars at the center of our galaxy has puzzled astronomers, but the orbits may be the key to unlocking the mystery, UCLA astronomy graduate student Jessica Lu reported today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. The astronomers use a new laser virtual star at the W.M. Keck observatory in Hawaii. <br /><br />The hostile environment around the supermassive black hole should make it extremely difficult for stars to form, but many young stars have been detected around the black hole, said Lu, who reported that she and a UCLA team are tracking a puzzling group of more than 30 massive young stars of uncertain origins. <br /><br />"How were these stars formed in such an inhospitable region?" Lu asked. "My advisor, Andrea Ghez, calls this mystery 'the paradox of youth.' Using the Keck's Laser Guide Star adaptive optics system, we expect to resolve the paradox. We are able to measure how these young stars move across the sky with an unparalleled precision (only two kilometers per second) and determine, for the first time, the orbit of each of the young stars located a few light months from the black hole. <br /><br />"Just as a fingerprint can be used to identify a person, the information encoded in the orbits of the young stars will tell us how and where they formed," said Lu, a member of a UCLA research team including her advisor, Ghez, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. <br /><br />Lu added that these are the closest stars to the supermassive black hole that have not had their orbits distorted by their inhospitable environment. <br /><br />"The orbits of these young stars suggest the stars were born far from the black hole in a massive star cluster, which migrate</font> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <strong><font color="#3366ff">Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yeild.</font> - <font color="#3366ff"><em>Tennyson</em></font></strong> </div>

 

[umpa_lumpa]

Doesn’t it seem like the stars could have been formed just far enough from the Black Hole to have formed, then as their life wen on the gravity of the black hole Slowly pulled them towards the black hole. I also thought that there was two giant black holes at the center of our galaxy?

 

[bonzelite]

<font color="yellow"><br />The hostile environment around the supermassive black hole should make it extremely difficult for stars to form, but many young stars have been detected around the black hole, said Lu, who reported that she and a UCLA team are tracking a puzzling group of more than 30 massive young stars of uncertain origins. </font><br /><br /><img src="/images/icons/rolleyes.gif" />