Astronomers have caught the giant black hole at our galaxy’s centre stretching the light emitted by an orbiting star — nearly three decades after they first starting tracking the star. The long-sought phenomenon, known as gravitational redshift, was predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but until now it had never been spotted in the environs of a black hole.
“It’s another big step in getting closer to understanding the black hole,” says Heino Falcke, an astronomer at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the research. “This is just amazing, to be able to see these effects.”
A team led by Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, announced the discovery today at a press conference and reports the results in Astronomy & Astrophysics1. The group includes scientists from universities and research institutions in Germany, France, Portugal, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United States and Ireland.
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