Stellar Motion Very Near the Milky Way’s Central Black Hole

MAR 01, 1998

The extraordinary pair of images at right are near‐infrared exposures, taken two years apart, of stars in the central $3×3‐ arcsecond$ field of our Galaxy. Andreas Eckart and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial trial Physics in Garching, near Munich, have been monitoring the proper and Doppler motions of these stars since 1992 with spectacularly high‐resolution infrared speckle photography and spectroscopy, using European Southern Observatory telescopes, in Chile, optimized for infrared observation. At visible wavelengths, the central precincts of the Galaxy are completely hidden by dust.

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