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Comment by tocs3 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/summary/

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.

When you think about it, it's so mindblowing that we humans can study and talk about these unimaginably large objects in the universe. Yet they just exist there regardless of what we do or think about them and will continue to exist way past whatever happens to our species.

Can you explain the past tense "there was" ? Is there a reason for a black hole to dissapear?

Black holes probably disappear due to Hawking radiation, but I don’t think we have observational evidence and the process takes forever for the black holes you can observe.

The black hole still exists (probably), the hypothesis that it existed was proven in the past.

It’s probably still there, but it’s 26,000 light years away, so the light we’re seeing today left Sag A in the Paleaolithic era.

A good chunk of science communication centres around how one conveys the wow factor to folks who aren't already obsessed with the particular field. Images like this really help sell it to the rest of us

> There should be much much more of this sort of thing.

As more telescopes come online, there'll be more data available for this type of stuff. You gotta realize that when a telescope only looks at something once per year, it takes a long time to gather enough data for these types of images to be created. My go to example is the motion of stars around SagA*.

Direct link: https://bsky.app/profile/sagastar.bsky.social/post/3mwucitft...

Imagine living on a planet circling a star circling a black hole. This thing in the sky just growing bigger and smaller in your sky on a 12 year, or longer, cycle.

I wonder what Sag A* would look like in the night sky.

A million solar masses of stuff (stars and gases) orbiting within a parsec of the black hole would be quite a view even without the accretion disk.

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