The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy

Fulvio Melia

190 pages, parution le 02/06/2003

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Résumé

Could Einstein have possibly anticipated directly testing the most captivating prediction of general relativity, that there exist isolated pockets of spacetime shielded completely from our own? Now, almost a century after that theory emerged, one of the world's leading astrophysicists presents a wealth of recent evidence that just such an entity, with a mass of about three million suns, is indeed lurking at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way--in the form of a supermassive black hole!

With this superbly illustrated, elegantly written, nontechnical account of the most enigmatic astronomical object yet observed, Fulvio Melia captures all the excitement of the growing realization that we are on the verge of actually seeing this exotic object within the next few years.

Melia traces our intellectual pilgrimage to the brooding behemoth at the heart of the Milky Way. He describes the dizzying technological advances that have recently brought us to the point of seeing through all the cosmic dust to a dark spot in a clouded cluster of stars in the constellation Sagittarius. Carefully assembling the compelling circumstantial evidence for its black hole status, he shows that it is primed to reveal itself as a glorious panorama of activity within this decade--through revolutionary images of its event horizon against the bright backdrop of nearby, radiating gas.

Uniquely, this book brings together a specific and fascinating astronomical subject--black holes--with a top researcher to provide both amateur and armchair astronomers, but also professional scientists seeking a concise overview of the topic, a real sense of the palpable thrill in the scientific community when an important discovery is imminent.

The galactic center
- The Hidden Realm
- Removing the Dusty Veils
- The Principal Constituents
- Exploration from Space
Condensation of dark matter
- A Swarm of Stars
- The Motion of Stars and Gas
- The Missing Mass
- A Super-Heavy Central Object
The theory of gravity
- What Is Mass?
- Development of a Gravity Theory
- Everything Is Relative
- The Principle of Equivalence
- The Key Predictions of General Relativity
- Black Holes and Their Event Horizons
A star in sagittarius
- Hawking Radiation
- Energy Extraction according to Penrose
- Cosmic Fireworks
- Shape and Size of Sagittarius A*
- The Glow of Matter Falling In
The event horizon
- The Environment near the Precipice
- How the Dark Shadow Forms
- An Image of the Black Hole within This Decade
- An X-Ray Image of the Dark Shadow from Space
- Impact on the General Theory of Relativity
Quasars and galactic nuclei
- The Host Galaxies of Quasars
- The Active Nuclei of Other Galaxies
- Superluminal Motion
- The Supermassive Black Hole Menagerie
- Future Horizons

Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Princeton University Press
Auteur(s)	Fulvio Melia
Parution	02/06/2003
Nb. de pages	190
Format	16 x 24
Couverture	Relié
Poids	630g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780691095059
ISBN13	978-0-691-09505-9