!9# Supermassive Black Hole in the Milky Way Galaxy

Monday, April 25, 2011

Supermassive Black Hole in the Milky Way Galaxy

From a distance, our galaxy would look like a flat spiral, some 100000 light years across, with pockets of gas, clouds of dust, and about 400 billion stars rotating around the galaxys center. Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of the galactic center. And yet, the clues have been piling up, that something important, something strange is going on in there. Astronomers tracking stars in the center of the galaxy have found the best proof to date that black holes exist. Now, they are shooting for the first direct image of a black hole. From a distance, our galaxy would look something like this. A flat spiral, some 100000 light years across, with pockets of gas, clouds of dust, and about 400 billion stars rotating around the galaxy's center. That center -- bulging up and out of the galactic disk -- is tightly packed with stars. Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of this so-called "bulge." And yet, the clues have been piling up, that something important...something strange... is going on in there. The first to take notice was the physicist Karl Jansky back in the 1930s. He was asked by his employer, Bell Telephone Labs, to investigate sources of static that might interfere with what it saw as the killer app of its time... radio voice transmissions. Using this ungainly radio receiver... Jansky methodically scanned the airwaves. He documented thunderstorms ...