https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25029
The core of our galaxy is a wild place. The stars are so densely packed that the night sky would be 500 times brighter. A supermassive black hole, 4 million times the mass of our Sun lurks in the center. It flings nearby stars into extreme slingshot orbits. It consumes anything that gets too close is consumed, burping a blast of X-rays. We know these things because we see them from our comfortable vantage point 28,000 light years out in the galactic disk. But there’s one particularly terrible feature of the core of our galaxy that, until now, has only been has only be hypothesized: The central few light years of the Milky Way is thought to contain a vast swarm of smaller black holes that have rained in from the surrounding galaxy.
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Captions provided by CCTubes – Captioning the Internet! It’s been conjectured that the center of the Milky Way is swarming with tens of thousands of black holes. And now we’ve actually seen them.
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Previous Episode:
Using Stars to See Gravitational Waves
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnwXyPU_ps0
This episode of Space Time Journal Club looks at the paper:
A density cusp of quiescent X-ray binaries in the central parsec of the Galaxy
by Hailey, Mori, Bauer, Berkowitz, Hong & Hord (2018)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25029
The core of our galaxy is a wild place. The stars are so densely packed that the night sky would be 500 times brighter. A supermassive black hole, 4 million times the mass of our Sun lurks in the center. It flings nearby stars into extreme slingshot orbits. It consumes anything that gets too close is consumed, burping a blast of X-rays. We know these things because we see them from our comfortable vantage point 28,000 light years out in the galactic disk. But there’s one particularly terrible feature of the core of our galaxy that, until now, has only been has only be hypothesized: The central few light years of the Milky Way is thought to contain a vast swarm of smaller black holes that have rained in from the surrounding galaxy.
Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Grayson Blackmon
Assistant Editing and Sound Design by Mike Petrow and Linda Huang
Made by Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com)
Special thanks to our Patreon Big Bang, Quasar and Hypernova Supporters:
Big Bang
CoolAsCats
David Nicklas
Anton Lifshits
Joey Redner
Fabrice Eap
Quasar
Tambe Barsbay
Mayank M. Mehrota
Mars Yentur
Mark Rosenthal
Dean Fuqua
Roman Pinchuk
ColeslawPurdie
Hypernova
Edmund Fokschaner
Matthew O’Connor
Eugene Lawson
Barry Hatfield
Martha Hunt
Joseph Salomone
Chuck Zegar
Jordan Young
Ratfeast
John Hofmann
Craig Peterson
Thanks to our Patreon Gamma Ray Burst Supporters:
James Hughes
Shannan Catalano
Fabian Olesen
Kris Fernet
Jane Meyers
James Flowers
Greg Allen
TJMadison
Denys Ivanov
Nick Virtue
Alexey Eromenko
Nicholas Rose
Scott Gossett
Mark Vasile
Patrick Murray
Sultan Alkhulaifi
Alex Seto
Michal-Peanut Karmi
Erik Stein
Kevin Warne
JJ Bagnell
J Rejc
Avi Goldfinger
John Pettit
Florian Stinglmayr
Benoit Pagé-Guitard
Nathan Leniz
Brandon Labonte
David Crane
Greg Weiss
Brandon Cook
Daniel Lyons
