Wow, not only have astronomers found a star that comes so close to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy that a detailed study of its orbit over the next decade should be able to quantify the black hole’s spin, there is a chance that future spectroscopic analysis will show…
Greg Egan on X: "Wow, not only have astronomers found a star that comes so close to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy that a detailed study of its orbit over the next decade should be able to quantify the black hole’s spin, there is a chance that future spectroscopic analysis will show…"
…that it was once part of a binary pair with a known hypervelocity star moving away from the galaxy’s centre, providing some evidence for the capture/eject Hills mechanism, explaining how stars end up so close to a black hole in the first place.I love the black hole at the centre of the galaxy so much that I wrote a novel about aliens learning General Relativity from the experience of orbiting it: gregegan.net/INCANDESCENCE/…
We should be building specialized equipment for this just like with eg Voyager when they figured out the favorable swing by mechanics during their launch time.
