Why Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole Is Hardly The Source For A 2012 Doomsda

Posted by Ticket037 on November 29th, 2012

Anyone who’s ever looked into a pitch black Arizona sky is likely to have peered towards the center of Sagittarius A-star (Sgr A*), the quiescent supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s heart.

But even in its most recent fully “active phase” only an estimated million years ago, Sgr A* would have never displayed the galactic black hole fireworks associated with the universe’s earliest quasars.
The fact is, despite pervasive internet rumors that a rare 2012 galactic alignment would trigger Sgr A* into unleashing a cosmic ray “killshot, ” our Milky Way’s resident black hole presents no more danger to planet Earth than would a Florida sinkhole to a Colorado snowboarder.

There is simply no scientific evidence for this “galactic alignment” says Reinhard Genzel, an astrophysicist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial d3 gold Physics in Garching.

However, thanks to Genzel and UCLA astrophysicist Andrea Ghez, there’s now plenty of new evidence confirming that Sgr A* is indeed a galactic black hole, which lies some 26, 000 light years away in the constellation of Sagittarius.

Both Ghez and Genzel used their own teams’ separate near-infrared, ground-based observations to observe stars zipping around Sgr A*.

Earlier this year, the two subsequently shared the 2012 Crafoord Prize in Astronomy, for their respective research “indicating the presence of a supermassive black hole” at our galaxy’s center.

Nicknamed for its associated radio source, the region surrounding this 4 million solar mass monstrosity is permanently cloaked in interstellar gas and dust.

But with the advent of high-resolution imaging, the researchers were able to discover and then study stars circling Sgr A*, which in turn allowed them to determine how much mass lies within these stars’ short-period orbits.

“Proof of the black hole is a tremendous amount of mass inside a very small volume, ” said Ghez. “There’s 4 million times the mass of our sun within a region that’s comparable to the size of our solar system. ”

In truth, Sgr A* is simply too puny to have ever had much effect on life out here in the galactic suburbs.

Even our neighboring Andromeda galaxy’s supermassive black hole has an estimated 100 million solar masses, while the heaviest black holes thought to exist may weigh as much as 10 billion solar masses.

“But despite [Sgr A*'s] small mass, there should be many other [galactic] black holes of this mass out there, ” said Alister Graham, an astrophysicist at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. “It’s just that they’re currently too far away for our technology to resolve the stars and gas moving around these black holes. ”


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