Giant black hole discovered at centre of Milky
Way
ABC Online 6/9/2001A massive black hole at the
heart of the Milky Way is probably crammed into a relatively small space no bigger than
the distance from the Earth to the Sun, scientists reported today.
Building on years of research into the mysterious matter-sucking space drains called black
holes, this finding does not absolutely confirm their existence - but it seems to rule out
alternative explanations for the weird cosmic behaviour at our galaxy's centre.
It also means Albert Einstein was right again, according to Frederick Baganoff of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose research was published in this week's edition
of Nature.
"The prediction seems to be right on the nose," Baganoff said in an interview,
referring to the great 20th century physicist's General Theory of Relativity, which
theorised that black holes exist at the middle of most big galaxies.
"What we are doing is just piling on the evidence, we keep making it so strong a case
that we can exclude more and more options," Baganoff said by telephone.
Baganoff and his colleagues used NASA's orbitting Chandra X-ray Observatory to look at the
galactic centre, peering through dust clouds and a cluster of stars in the constellation
Sagittarius.
Earlier research had shown that the mass of the Milky Way's probable black hole was 2.6
million times the mass of the Sun.
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