The story concerns a “supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, a monster with the mass of four million suns called Sagittarius A, or SgrA”:
Put simply, when S0-2 is closest to SgrA*, the black hole acts like a speed bump, slowing down the star’s light as it escapes into the cosmos. The effect shows up as a stretching of S0-2’s light toward less energetic, redder wavelengths.
“Gravitational redshift is fundamentally encoded in the spectroscopy,” says Ghez, who noted that S0-2’s starlight slows down by about 125 miles a second—exactly what Einstein’s equations predict for an object with SgrA*’s gravitational heft. As a bonus, the work more precisely pins down the mass and distance of SgrA*.
Nadia Drake, “Extreme black hole vindicates Einstein (again)” at National Geographic
Of course, there is so much talk these days of a crisis in physics that one is tempted to wonder if vindicating Einstein is regarded as just as positive an event as it would have been decades ago. Good stuff anyway.
See also: At Scientific American: Understanding the cosmology crisis
At Forbes: Cosmology’s Crisis Is Merely “Manufactured Misunderstandings”
Rob Sheldon: The real reason there is a crisis in cosmology Nearly everything that has failed about the Big Bang model has been added because of bad metaphysics, a refusal to accept the consequences of a beginning. The remaining pieces of the Big Bang model that are failing and which can’t be attributed to bad metaphysics, were added from sheer laziness.
Here’s the supermassive black hole:
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