Zoom to the center of the Milky Way

[pokerfan]

This zoom sequence stars with a view of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, then zooms in towards the crowded center of the galaxy, in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius the Archer. Then the scene shifts to an infrared view, which lets us see see through the dusty clouds in this direction and get a close-up view of objects orbiting the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. The final views show the motion of a newly discovered gas cloud that is falling rapidly towards the central black hole.

http://earthsky.org/space/video-zoom-in-to-the-center-of-the-milky-way

[Esra Star]

1. UFB..thanks

[66 dmhlt]

2. That was fun! Thanks for sharing it.

You may enjoy this one, too:

[progressoid]

7. That was cool

For some reason, I really like the part with the satellites around earth.

[Surya Gayatri]

3. Thanks pokerfan...I love finding stuff like this on DU!

What an astonishingly beautiful universe we little specks exist in!

[Liz_Estrada]

4. My thanks also

Had to watch it multiple times. 'Awe-full' amazing! You reminded me to take time out from daily minutiae to experience wonder.

[Peace Patriot]

5. I'm not sure what I'm seeing.

From a distance, you can see that there is one helluva lot of LIGHT at the center of the galaxy--a vast concentration of suns whirling around and seeming to fling jets of light (strings of suns) out into space which seem to spin around the center, whirligig fashion (the spiral structure). But this zoom in to the black hole at the center is not what I expected. The surrounding area is not as bright as I expected. I really don't understand "where" the black hole is. There are just a few stars (globes of light) in a kind of bubble formation and some of them seem to blink off and on (is that an effect of the "cloud"?) and then one seems to merge with another (forming a bigger, bright oval). Is that a stellar event? And what do the numbers mean (the 2000 plus/minus sequence)?

i mean, I know that it's "black" and all (unseeable) but what you can see, around it (?), looks like any random point in the galaxy (or any galaxy). Visually, there is nothing special. (Or am I not seeing it?)

It is mindboggling that this is a PHOTO (not a simulation). I sometimes feel like my Mom who was born to the horse and buggy age and died post-Moon Walk and post-Mars Rover in the computer age. She saw SO MANY enormous changes--the beginnings and then proliferation of telephones, electricity, cars, radio, TV--all virtually non-existent when she was born--bi-planes to jet air travel, dirt roads to freeways, Victorian bustles to mini-skirts, and so on. But I, too, have seen enormous changes--from analog to digital to wireless, for instance. (As a young woman in the 1960s, I went from high heels, nylon stockings with seams down the back that you had to keep straight, girdles, hats, gloves and other restrictive and required clothing to almost total freedom of dress, almost overnight.) And, in astronomy, I've seen advances in both technology and theory that have 're-written' the cosmos itself, with the Hubble telescope photos being one of the most dramatic (being able to see the sky on the other side of our atmosphere SO CLEARLY--so seemingly dense with stars and galaxies, seeing so clearly over vast, vast distances, far, far, far into the past, almost to the birth of this universe) and perhaps even more important (though the sheer beauty of the Hubble photos is hard to surpass), the discovery of hundreds of planets--many of them earthlike--around other suns--making the odds for life (and intelligent life) elsewhere in our galaxy and in the universe soar, well...astronomically.

And I coud name a hundred other huge changes that were technically or imaginatively "impossible" only a few decades ago (except, of course to sf writers). But this PHOTOGRAPH of the center of our galaxy beats all. It really does. Such a little nothing bit of space with a few fairy lights flitting about. If this vid is accurate, we may be looking into the womb of all matter and life, at least in the Milky Way, or the port-hole to parallel, future or past universes, or to the past-future of this one. Amazing. Combined with the announcement from CERN today (99% certainty that the Higgs Boson particle exists--key to gravitons and possibly to transcendence of time-space--as I understand this discovery), I'm feeling like I died and was revived, oh, 500 years from now. Are we ready for this? No. Is the future collapsing upon us, while we occupy ourselves with oil wars and burning up our planet's fragile atmosphere for no good reason--while we have yet to conquer greed? Yup. Certain parts of our brains far outpace our ethics.

On the other hand, science and education can and do improve our ethics--most especially as to a larger view of our own lives and of human life and society in general. Let us hope that these quite staggering advances in science and engineering will do just that--eventually, despite the trough we are in now, as to general human progress.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

10. The Milky Way is speculated to actually be two galaxies merged together

It is a bar type galaxy. This explains the hodgepodge of objects scattered all through it.

[img][/img]

We can't actually look at the center because of dark clouds of interstellar matter that block our view.

[AlecBGreen]

6. wow!

jawdropping

[tridim]

8. I've never understood how they are so sure they're looking at the actual center?

What is it the center of? We don't really have a frame of reference observing from our place in the galaxy.

Finding a super massive black hole in the bulge just tells me there is at least one where they're looking, but I don't think that necessarily means it's at the center.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

11. Want to read about a future black hole?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VY_Canis_Majoris

[Posteritatis]

12. There's a pretty specific point that they can see everything in the area noticably orbiting

The distances between objects is very small there, and things tend to move quickly. There's a distinct center of gravity for the whole core area that a few decades of looking has figured out from effects on light, from watching stars orbit around or otherwise interact with it, etc.

[Peace Patriot]

16. Thank you! That is a helpful explanation.

Am I right that this is an actual photograph, not a simulation?

I am curious about the blob of light (a sun?) that seems to merge with another blob of light (another sun?) to form a bright oval larger than either--among the blinking on-off objects near the black hole (in this vid). Is this seeming merger an effect of the small distances between objects and their fast orbiting speed around the black hole? It occurs to me that these two objects are not merging but rather one is transiting the other slightly off center (from our point of view).

Is the total volume of our galaxy diminishing, as suns and solar systems slip over the "event horizon" at the center into ...oblivion? suspension? compression? (I'm not sure what happens to them)? I've done some "bubble" work at the Milky Way Project so I'm aware that there are vast stellar nurseries in our galaxy, where more suns are being born. Does it balance out? Is the galaxy in a "steady state" of matter creation and matter...um, disappearance? Does anybody know?

The spiral structure of our galaxy (and many others) certainly resembles water swirling down a bathtub drain. Is that essentially what is happening? --except that water doesn't create water, whereas, in areas of our galaxy, "green knots" and "fuzzy red objects" and stripes of dark-dark matter are meanwhile interacting (somehow) to create new suns. But will all of this some day get sucked down the "drain"? Do galaxies eventually blink out of existence into their own black holes?

[Posteritatis]

17. Yeah, you're seeing actual imagery there

And that includes the animated bit towards the very end - what you're seeing there are stars orbiting the center of mass with a period of a couple of decades, which in terms of star distances is basically the equivalent of rolling over the surface of the thing instead. The closest of them's a star they're just calling S2 for now - it gets within less than a light-day of the black hole's surface and is moving at something completely bonkers like two percent of lightspeed when it does so.

Basically imagine if you took something like our solar system, but replaced the sun with the black hole and the comets with other stars.

The merging's definitely a transit; if that was a collision it would be a lot more dramatic at the speeds things are moving there.

On its largest scale the galaxy's comparable to the solar system - things aren't necessarily going "down the drain," but they are orbiting that common center. Things are supposed to eventually nickle-and-dime themselves down to that point, but we're talking about incredibly vast timescales before that happens - hundreds of trillions of years as a minimum, and probably longer than that.

[Peace Patriot]

20. I thought that black hole gravity inevitably pulls matter into it...

...so that those bright bulbs (suns?) that we see in the vid circling the black hole are literally "doomed' to be sucked into the black hole much sooner than all the rest of the galaxy.

But--if that is true--does the star-generation in other parts of our galaxy "balance" it out, as to the long term existence of our galaxy?

But maybe my understanding of what happens to matter near a black hole is wrong.

I was trying to imagine what conditions would exist for those objects near the black hole. I read somewhere that if you fell into a black hole, you would never get "there." You would be infinitely suspended in time and space. Are those effects true near a black hole, as well as within (past the "event horizon" of) a black hole? I guess I'm thinking that there could be a whole civilization on a planet or planets surrounding one of those suns where things happen much faster (or much slower?) than here, or things keep repeating (as in the movie "Groundhog Day&quot , or people live like redwood tress (very slowly, for two thousand years) or like fireflies (24 hours of life and reproduction and that's it). CAN biological life exist that close to a black hole (within a light day)?

Amazing vid, anyway. Very thought provoking.

Thanks again for your explanations.

[Posteritatis]

21. Only within a certain distance

Which depends on the size of the black hole.

If you replaced the sun with a black hole that massed the same as the sun, for instance, the only effect on the solar system would be that it wouldn't be lit up anymore, since the overall mass (and therefore overall amount of gravity) would be the same. Something could orbit quite close to it perfectly comfortably. There's a certain distance from a black hole, which again depends on its size, that something can't escape, but outside of that distance they behave more or less the same way a star or planet or Volkswagen of the same size would.

In the long term a lot of those stars probably are toast, especially the one that gets as close as it does, because sooner or later something in the area would probably nudge its orbit in a way that it blundered into the black hole's Schwarzschild radius and became the day's lunch. Though at the same time, there's a chance that it might not and would instead pick up enough speed from a close approach that it would get flung out of the area altogether. It might be close to that point already, because it's moving a couple of thousand kilometers a second at its closest approach.

Life might be able to exist that close to something like that if it was a more stable environment, but the area near the core might as well be the gravitational equivalent of a snow globe sitting on a paint shaker - there probably isn't enough stable space for a planetary system to form and stay in one place without running into something, getting flung off into deep space, or getting sterilized by radiation from a collision nearby, the jets being fired out of the black hole, or anything like that.

[tridim]

22. And dark matter is governing the spin of the entire galaxy.

Stars in a galxy don't spin (around the drain) like we thought they should.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

9. Off to the desert again.

I have a nice Mead telescope but there's WAY too much light pollution here at home to use it for much more than checking out clusters and planets and a few nebula. I showed my neighbor the rings of Saturn for the first time in his life. It just pulls in enough of mars to see the polar caps. I gotta order a Barlow Lens to boost it. It's got auto-tracking motors and I got Autostar for it.

[img][/img]

After a few reference stars to calibrate the scope all you have to do is select an object from the menu and the telescope will automatically point at it and then compensate for the rotation of the earth so it stays in the center of view.

One thing I'd like to do is set up a laptop to use the free open source program Stellarium.

[img][/img]

Just point and click and the telescope with turn to the object. Couple that with a camera on the lens to look at a live feed in a separate window so you don't have to squint into a lens. You can see what the telescope sees on the computer. I visited someone years ago who has that setup in his yard. It was a big reflector mounted in a concrete foundation. He was able to observe from his den and throw the feed to a big flat panel TV on the wall.

Astronomy is a great way of putting things in perspective. Our tiny planet is such an insignificant speck and it really makes a joke of people who act like they are masters of the universe.

[awoke_in_2003]

14. I am city bound...

and I love stellarium.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

15. I feel for you. Must be frustrating.

If it makes you feel better even a cheap telescope can show you the rings of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter.Those are much closer than people think they are. I've seen the rings through binoculars.

[awoke_in_2003]

18. I make it out...

To Texas Hill Country a couple times a year. The view at night is amazing.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

19. On the road to Vegas we pull off on Zyzzx Road. No lights and no traffic.

From there after your eyes adjust on a moonless night you can actually see colors in the Milky Way and in close Nebula with the naked eye. I still have an old laptop designed to boot into an old DOS based program called Skyglobe. Sure beats the old days of the planisphere.

[img][/img]

[secondvariety]

13. "My God, it's full of stars!"

Dave Bowman-2001