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Fastest star ever seen is moving at 8% the speed of light:
In the center of our galaxy, hundreds of stars closely orbit a supermassive black hole. Most of these stars have large enough orbits that their motion is described by Newtonian gravity and Kepler's laws of motion. But a few orbit so closely that their orbits can only be accurately described by Einstein's theory of general relativity. The star with the smallest orbit is known as S62. Its closest approach to the black hole has it moving more than 8% of light speed.
[...] For years, S2 was thought to be the closest star to SgrA*, but then S62 was discovered. As a team recently discovered, it's a star about twice as massive as the sun that orbits the black hole every 10 years. By their calculations, at the closest approach, its speed approaches 8% of the speed of light. That's so fast that time dilation comes into play. An hour at S62 would last about 100 Earth minutes.
Because of its proximity to SgrA*, S62 doesn't follow a Keplerian orbit. Rather than being a simple ellipse, it follows a spirograph motion by which its orbit precesses about 10 degrees with each cycle. This kind of relativistic precession was first observed with the orbit of Mercury, but only as a small effect.
Journal Reference:
Florian Peißker, Andreas Eckart, and Marzieh Parsa. S62 on a 9.9 yr Orbit around SgrA* - IOPscience, The Astrophysical Journal (2020) (DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab5afd)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday August 17 2020, @03:41PM (4 children)
First, the CMB is not infrared light, it's microwaves (that's why it is called the cosmic microwave background).
Second, while the individual photons of course move with the speed of light, the same is not true for the CMB as a whole. This is because not all photons fly in the same direction.
One way to understand the rest frame of the CMB is to imagine some object in space that is opaque in the relevant frequencies, and that is not subject to any force except for the interaction with the CMB. If that body is in the rest frame of the CMB, the radiation pressure from all sides will be the same, and therefore the body will not feel a net force. Otherwise the radiation pressure will be larger in the direction it is moving relative to the CMB frame, and therefore it will experience a (very small) force in the opposite direction. You could consider it to be the friction of the CMB.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday August 17 2020, @03:58PM (1 child)
> the CMB is not infrared light, it's microwaves
Semantics!
> One way to understand the rest frame of the CMB...
Very interesting! I should have thought of that. Presumably it is also that frame of reference where the CMB is to first order (doing a multipole expansion or something) uniform frequency in all directions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday August 17 2020, @04:54PM
Yes. Indeed that is how you would actually measure the speed relative to the CMB. But I think the friction view is more intuitive, as it relates to something about “at rest relative to” from our everyday experience: We experience friction with another object only if we are not at rest relative to it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2020, @04:43PM (1 child)
So the rest frame is the velocity at which the CMB frequency is the same in all directions. Nice. What's our current V wrt that?
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday August 17 2020, @05:06PM
According to this article, [scientificamerican.com] our speed relative to the CMB is 390 km/s. While it isn't written there, I guess it's an average, as the orbital speed of the earth is around 30 km/s, which is a significant fraction of the above speed, and according to the article linked above, the direction of movement relative to CMB is towards Leo, which is in the ecliptic (so at some time in the year, the orbital speed will be added to the sun's speed, and half a year later it will be subtracted from it).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.