stars orbiting our galaxy's supermassive black hole

from Andrea Ghez at UCLA.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• black
• hole

[GabeZTV]

i totally understood what i just saw

[segmentationfault]

Gravity fuck yeah

[EmoCactus]

Scary shit, it's what holds our galaxy together.

[TheRationalizer]

@rajansos

Look at the purple line at the top, that looks like it is either going away from us or towards us. They could have made it more clear by making the lines brighter or darker to indicate depth.

[Deprival100]

@rajansos only a guess but

The way you measure the movements of stars is by inferring the speed from the doppler shift, then you can plot the data in a 2d representation like the above. But good question i took it on faith when looking at this.

hope that helps

[rajansos]

can someone explain to me why the stars is only moving in a 2d way.

What i mean is why doesent the stars come towerd or away from the the camera or what ever is that record this.

Would be greatfull if someone could answer my questen

[TheNextLevel11]

Disclosure Project: What a success! It will be great when they start to explain the history of their own stars! Arcturus, Andromeda etc..

[derpenstein]

In terms of a black hole, the harm arises when there is a stronger gravitational pull on your feet (for example) than your head. This results in a stretching which could be fatal. Normal gravitation just pulls you towards the BH.

For a normal stellar BH of 3 solar masses the EH radius is about 9km whereas the distance at which tidal gravitation might become fatal is about 400km. For a supermassive BH of 1000 solar masses the EH is about 3000km, and you might feasibly cross that EH in one piece.

[derpenstein]

Motherfucker I know what spaghettification is. What I'm telling you is that spaghettification occurs across the event horizon and the black hole would have to be many light years across for the event horizon to be long enough to stretch your body out to a light year. And as far as I know there are not any black holes that large.

[derpenstein]

"it travels so fast light can't escape".... wha? No, it's got so much gravity light can't escape.

But seriously check your references about spaghettification. Without looking it up myself I'm almost certain that it only occurs while crossing the event horizon.

[derpenstein]

Don't see why not.. if an orbital ejection occurs along the correct trajectory... kablooey a few million years later.