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. 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.

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