The Unluckiest Stars at the Center of Galaxies | Prof. Wenbin Lu
Автор: UC Berkeley Astronomy Night
Загружено: 2026-01-15
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Lecture Date: 10/2/25
Speaker: Prof. Wenbin Lu
Summary: Imagine living in a world near a supermassive black hole! While it might not be by choice, stars at the heart of our Milky Way revolve around a 4-million-solar-mass black hole, completing their orbits in as short as 16 years. It took the Nobel Prize-winning teams over two decades to trace these stellar orbits and measure this black hole's mass. Recent observations have revealed an enigmatic class of sources that exhibit periodic X-ray bursts at the centers of some distant galaxies. Theorists (the speaker included) proposed that these X-ray bursts are produced by stars in extremely close orbits to supermassive black holes --- with orbital periods from a few hours to days. We will explore how these stars may migrate so close to the black holes in the first place and how Einstein's General Relativity predicts unusual orbits that cause the recurrence times of the bursts to vary. These variations may provide a new way to measure the masses and spin rates of supermassive black holes in remote galaxies. On a timescale of only about 100 years, however, these unlucky stars will be completely consumed.
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