1 minute read
Black Hole
Sunday, November 06, 2022
Blog readers will know that the Hawaiian telescope issue - which involves UC - comes up again and again in public comment segments of the Regents meetings. It may well come up at the upcoming meetings later this month. The Regents have held only one session of their own on the topic, but it was a discussion only. No action was taken.* Most of the public comments have tended to be negative, i.e., demands that UC pull out of the consortium that is proposing the Thirty-Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea.
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The Regents, however, have not acted. Most likely, the reason for their non-action in the face of protests by native Hawaiians and allies is that the site with its existing telescopes has been very valuable to the astronomy community. A recent article from the New York Times suggests that value:
Astronomers Find a Black Hole in Our Cosmic Back Yard
Almost but not quite in time for Halloween, astronomers announced on Friday that they had discovered the closest known black hole. It is a biggie, a shell of yawning emptiness 10 times as massive as the sun, orbiting as far from its own star as the Earth is from ours... Dr. [Kareem] El-Badry, [an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics], and his team detected a star, virtually identical to our sun, that was jittering strangely, as if under the gravitational influence of an invisible companion. To investigate further, the researchers commandeered the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which could measure the speed and period of this wobble and thus determine the relative masses of the objects involved. The technique is identical to the process by which astronomers analyze the wobbles of stars to detect the presence of orbiting exoplanets — except this time the quarry was far bigger. Their results and subsequent calculations were consistent with a black hole of 10 solar masses being circled by a star similar to our own. They named it Gaia BH1...
Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/science/astronomy-black-hole.html.
*Audio of that session is at https://ia801904.us.archive.org/20/items/regents-7-30-20ampart-2/Regents%207-30-20am%20Part%202.mp3 or https://archive.org/details/regents-730-20am-part-2/Regents+7-30-20am+Part+2.WMA.
To hear the text above, click on the link below:
https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/black%20hole.mp3
