{"id":80959,"date":"2018-07-26T07:22:23","date_gmt":"2018-07-26T14:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/culmination-of-26-years-of-eso-observations-of-the-heart-of-the-milky-way"},"modified":"2018-07-26T07:22:23","modified_gmt":"2018-07-26T14:22:23","slug":"culmination-of-26-years-of-eso-observations-of-the-heart-of-the-milky-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/culmination-of-26-years-of-eso-observations-of-the-heart-of-the-milky-way","title":{"rendered":"Culmination of 26 years of ESO observations of the heart of the Milky Way"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/culmination-of-26-years-of-eso-observations-of-the-heart-of-the-milky-way.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Observations made with ESO\u2019s Very Large Telescope have for the first time revealed the effects predicted by Einstein\u2019s general relativity on the motion of a star passing through the extreme gravitational field near the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way. This long-sought result represents the climax of a 26-year-long observation campaign using ESO\u2019s telescopes in Chile.<\/p>\n<p>Obscured by thick clouds of absorbing dust, the closest supermassive black hole to the Earth lies 26 000 light-years away at the centre of the Milky Way. This gravitational monster, which has a mass four million times that of the Sun, is surrounded by a small group of stars orbiting around it at high speed. This extreme environment \u2014 the strongest gravitational field in our galaxy \u2014 makes it the perfect place to explore gravitational physics, and particularly to test Einstein\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/General_relativity\">general theory of relativity<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>New infrared observations from the exquisitely sensitive <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/teles-instr\/paranal-observatory\/vlt\/vlt-instr\/gravity\/\">GRAVITY<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/news\/eso1825\/#1\">[1]<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/teles-instr\/paranal-observatory\/vlt\/vlt-instr\/sinfoni\/\">SINFONI<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/teles-instr\/paranal-observatory\/vlt\/vlt-instr\/naco\/\">NACO<\/a> instruments on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/teles-instr\/paranal-observatory\/vlt\/\">ESO\u2019s Very Large Telescope<\/a> (VLT) have now allowed astronomers to follow one of these stars, called S2, as it passed very close to the black hole during May 2018. At the closest point this star was at a distance of less than 20 billion kilometres from the black hole and moving at a speed in excess of 25 million kilometres per hour \u2014 almost three percent of the speed of light <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/news\/eso1825\/#2\">[2]<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/news\/eso1825\/\">https:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/news\/eso1825\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Observations made with ESO\u2019s Very Large Telescope have for the first time revealed the effects predicted by Einstein\u2019s general relativity on the motion of a star passing through the extreme gravitational field near the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way. This long-sought result represents the climax of a 26-year-long observation campaign [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":464,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/464"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}