Word: center
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Einstein's theory is correct, black holes are the natural consequences of the death of giant stars. In what astronomers call catastrophic gravitational collapse, most of the matter contained in such a dying star begins falling in toward the stellar center. If the conditions are right, the matter crushes together with such enormous force that it literally compresses itself out of existence. The star becomes what mathematicians call a "singularity." Its matter is squeezed into an infinitesimally small volume, and it simultaneously becomes infinitely dense and has an infinitely high gravitational force. At the point of singularity, time and space...
...each at the heart of a globular cluster of stars in the halo of the earth's Milky Way galaxy. In the inner regions of these clusters, which contain tens of thousands of individual stars, some of the stars are revolving with wobbly motions, as if disturbed by a center of enormous gravity. Herbert Gursky and Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics believe that these stars "may well be orbiting a black hole with the mass of a thousand suns." Still other candidates lie far beyond the Milky Way. At least two galaxies, known...
...ethereal as a ray of starlight?would curve toward the object in the center...
...suns. Observations with the big telescopes at California's Palomar and Arizona's Kitt Peak National observatories strongly support the likelihood that at least one such heavyweight exists in M87, a galaxy that appears to be spewing out a great jet of matter. Astronomers found that M87's center is ten times as bright as the rest of the galaxy, and is surrounded by stars orbiting at unexpectedly high velocities. To provide the gravitational power plant for this galactic vortex, Cambridge's Martin Rees posits a black hole 5 billion times as massive as the sun in M87's core...
Zwicky and Baade even suggested a possible location of such a neutron star. They predicted that one might be found in the center of the expanding gases of the celebrated Crab Nebula, the site of a Milky Way supernova that was observed by Chinese astronomers...