アルベルト・アインシュタインさんのインスタグラム写真 - (アルベルト・アインシュタインInstagram)「Posted @withregram • @nobelprize_org For almost thirty years, 2020 Physics Laureates Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez have followed stars in the distant stellar jumble at the centre of our galaxy in order to determine what is at the heart of the Milky Way. The researchers track some thirty of the brightest stars at our galaxy's centre. The stars move most rapidly within a radius of one light-month from the centre of the Milky Way, inside which they perform a busy dance like that of a swarm of bees. The stars that are outside this area, on the other hand, follow elliptical orbits in a more orderly manner. One star, called S2 or S-O2, completes an orbit of the centre of the galaxy in less than 16 years. This is an extremely short time, so the astronomers were able to map its entire orbit. We can compare this to the Sun, which takes more than 200 million years to complete one lap around the Milky Way’s centre; dinosaurs were walking the Earth when we started our current lap. The researchers' studies of these stars not only confirm Einstein's theory of general relativity they also give evidence to the size of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy - calculated as equivalent to around 4 million solar masses, packed into a region the size of our solar system. Image: An artist’s impression of the precession of the star S2’s orbit. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada #NobelPrize #NobelLaureate #astronomy #stars #blackhole」11月17日 23時16分