Ghez's research team was able to see the co-mingling of space and time near the supermassive black hole. For more than two decades, the division has supported Ghez, along with several of the technical elements critical to the research team's discovery. The researchers studied photons -- particles of light -- as they traveled from S to Earth. S moves around the black hole at blistering speeds of more than 16 million miles per hour at its closest approach.
Einstein had reported that in this region close to the black hole, photons have to do extra work. Their wavelength as they leave the star depends not only on how fast the star is moving, but also on how much energy the photons expend to escape the black hole's powerful gravitational field.
Near a black hole, gravity is much stronger than on Earth. Ghez was given the opportunity to present partial data last summer, but chose not to so that her team could thoroughly analyze the data first.
It's one of four fundamental forces and the one we have tested the least," she said. It's easy to be overconfident and there are many ways to misinterpret the data, many ways that small errors can accumulate into significant mistakes, which is why we did not rush our analysis. Ghez, a recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, studies more than 3, stars that orbit the supermassive black hole. Hundreds of them are young, she said, in a region where astronomers did not expect to see them.
It takes 26, years for the photons from S to reach Earth. This is the first of many tests of general relativity Ghez's research team will conduct on stars near the supermassive black hole. Most of the stars Ghez studies have orbits of much longer than a human lifespan.
Ghez's team took measurements about every four nights during crucial periods in using the Keck Observatory -- which sits atop Hawaii's dormant Mauna Kea volcano and houses one of the world's largest and premier optical and infrared telescopes. Keck Foundation. The W. Keck Observatory telescopes are the most scientifically productive on Earth.
The data presented herein were obtained at the W. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W.
The authors recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the Native Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. An artist visualization of the star S as it passes by the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center. Credit: Nicolle R. With adaptive optics at Keck Observatory, Ghez and her colleagues have revealed many surprises about the environments surrounding supermassive black holes.
For example, they discovered young stars where none was expected to be seen and a lack of old stars where many were anticipated. In , she and colleagues reported that for the first time, astronomers had seen stars accelerate around the supermassive black hole.
In , Ghez and her colleagues took the first clear picture of the center of the Milky Way, including the area surrounding the black hole, at Keck Observatory. Stuart Wolpert July 25, Video by Julie Winokur.
Light from the center of the galaxy. Ethan Tweedie. Lasers from the two Keck telescopes point in the direction of the center of our galaxy. Tags: research science technology space sciences physics astronomy. He published the first part of his theory — special relativity — in the German physics journal Annalen der Physik in and completed his theory of general relativity only after another decade of difficult work.
He presented the latter theory in a series of lectures in Berlin in late and published in the Annalen in Starting from these two postulates, Einstein showed that space and time are intertwined in ways that scientists had never previously realized.
Through a series of thought experiments, Einstein demonstrated that the consequences of special relativity are often counterintuitive — even startling. If your rocket speeds up, your mass and that of the rocket will increase. The faster you go, the heavier things become and the more your rocket will resist your efforts to make it go faster.
Einstein showed that nothing that has a mass can ever reach the speed of light. Because the speed of light is such a big number, even a tiny amount of mass is equivalent to — and can be converted into — a very large amount of energy.
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