Recent news : Black hole at the Galactic Centre!

Recent observations by the European Southern Observatory's VLT instrument have provided conclusive evidence for a massive black hole at the Galactic Centre. These are based on the observations of a star orbiting the Galactic centre with a 15.2 year period.

The images above put these results in the right perspective. On the left is an image from our survey of the Galactic Centre regions with the 1.4m IRSF/SIRIUS at Sutherland, South Africa. This image is a single frame (8' by 8') composed of J, H and Ks mapped to Blue, Green and Red. On the right is a high resolution image of the innermost region (marked by square in the image on the left) with the ESO's 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) taken in H, K and L bands. The conclusive result for the existence of the Black hole is based on the observed motion of the star (over the last decade) marked by the yellow arrows on the VLT image.

For more details follow the links to the press release, associated papers etc from these groups.

These are the conclusions based on a multi-institutional observing campaign that has involved telescopes from various continents (ESO's NTT, Keck and now the VLT). References to earlier papers can be seen on the home page of Dr Andrea Ghez of the UCLA. Heino Falcke's web pages provide links to additional (older) resources on the GC black hole including an Annual Reviews article and an mpeg movie showing the motion of the stars around the GC (between the period 1992 to 1998).

For work related to the Inner regions of the Milky Way by PRL members see this link. Our work involves studies of the large scale structure of the Inner Milky Way over several degrees in the plane of the sky, in contrast to the very high resolution observations (over a very very small part of the sky) reported by the European and American groups above.

Last changed: Monday, October 21, 2002, 15:36:05IST Noon UT = 17:30 local time(IST)