Thread

A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting

402 points · 82 comments · mariuz

tocs3 · 1790949784 · focus · HN ↗
Amazing. Scrolling down one of the comments has an animation of starts around the center of the Milky Way. I have seen a few short ones of nebulae. There should be much much more of this sort of thing.
I appreciate that scientist are not always after the pretty pictures. They can be expensive, do not always give the data needed, and the experiments do not always produce data that has obvious pretty picture potential. Still, for the average non professional scientist (me) the pictures are about all I will ever get out of the science.
1. turtletontine · 1790970815 · focus · HN ↗
  The galactic center data actually proved there was a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and weighed it precisely from those stars motions. The name of the account that posted that animation (Sagittarius A*) is the name of that supermassive black hole.
  This work earned the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics: <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/summary/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/summary/
  1. ccozan · 1790978946 · focus · HN ↗
    Can you explain the past tense "there was" ? Is there a reason for a black hole to dissapear?
    teamonkey · 1790980330 · focus · HN ↗
    The black hole still exists (probably), the hypothesis that it existed was proven in the past.
    adrianN · 1790991769 · focus · HN ↗
    Black holes probably disappear due to Hawking radiation, but I don’t think we have observational evidence and the process takes forever for the black holes you can observe.
    kristianc · 1791026157 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s probably still there, but it’s 26,000 light years away, so the light we’re seeing today left Sag A in the Paleaolithic era.
  2. dekhn · 1790987237 · focus · HN ↗
    The term I would use instead is that the data provided observational support of a hypothesis. It didn't "prove" anything- proofs only exist in math. (yes, I know people use "prove" is colloquial way, but it's misleading, especially in observational work where you can't control variables to find causality.
  3. rpozarickij · 1791034226 · focus · HN ↗
    When you think about it, it's so mindblowing that we humans can study and talk about these unimaginably large objects in the universe. Yet they just exist there regardless of what we do or think about them and will continue to exist way past whatever happens to our species.

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