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More Mystery Objects Detected near Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole

posted by mrpg on Saturday June 09 2018, @04:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-more-the-merrier dept.

Gaaark writes:

More mystery objects detected near Milky Way's supermassive black hole

Astronomers have discovered several bizarre objects at the Galactic Center that are concealing their true identity behind a smoke screen of dust; they look like gas clouds, but behave like stars.

[...] "These compact dusty stellar objects move extremely fast and close to our Galaxy's supermassive black hole. It is fascinating to watch them move from year to year," said [Anna] Ciurlo. "How did they get there? And what will they become? They must have an interesting story to tell."

[...] GCOI [UCLA's Galactic Center Orbits Initiative] thinks that these G-objects are the result of stellar mergers—where two stars orbiting each other, known as binaries, crash into each other due to the gravitational influence of the giant black hole. Over a long period of time, the black hole's gravity alters the binary stars' orbits until the duo collides. The combined object that results from this violent merger could explain where the excess energy came from.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday June 10 2018, @03:30PM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Sunday June 10 2018, @03:30PM (#691114) Homepage
    > I think I was 11 when I did a speech on the Michelson-Morely experiment

    Or LIGO, as we now like to call it!
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  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday June 10 2018, @07:49PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Sunday June 10 2018, @07:49PM (#691167) Journal

    Huh...nice. Never thought of LIGO that way.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @12:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @12:28PM (#691366)

    Wait, so you are saying Michaelson and Morley were so lucky they didn't caught some gravitational wave with their apparatus, which would totally mess their results up even worse than it did considering what they knew and believed in back then?