Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: jeffreyH on 18/06/2016 15:53:12
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I have looked for data on the orbital periods of the s-stars around Sag A* but have had no luck so far. I would be grateful for information on this.
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A lot of the research on the Milky Way massive black hole has been done by the Max Plank Institute in Germany. Here is a link into their website:
http://www.mpe.mpg.de/ir/GC
Wikipedia appears to have profiles on some of the stars circling the candidate black hole, eg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S2_(star)
There is a graph of some of the orbits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*#Central_black_hole
There is also time-lapse & computer animations on Youtube:
Happy hunting!
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I had already found the s2 page on wikipedia but it didn't have the data I needed. It covered 2 stars in detail from what I remember. There may be a star even closer than s2. I am very interested in the Max Planck link!
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So if you don't know about it there is this pretty cool program called Universe Sandbox that lets you either build your own gravitational systems or look at ones like the solar system or the galaxy (naturally at different levels of detail). There's a way to open up simulations other people have made and one of them appears to be at least some the stars around sag A*. Looks like S0-1, S0-2, S0-4, S0-5, S0-16, S0-19 and S0-20. I'm not sure you can get the orbital data out but you can watch the system evolve in time and you can edit the properties of all the bodies (mass, velocity, etc) or add new ones to the system.
http://universesandbox.com/ <- Apparently it has been updated since I last looked at it.