Word: m87
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...black holes lurk at the core of many galaxies--including our own--was confirmed by Holland Ford, now at Johns Hopkins, and his collaborators, who used the Hubble to spot a superheated disk of gas spinning at a dizzying 1.2 million m.p.h. at the very heart of the galaxy M87, 50 million light-years from Earth. The only reasonable explanation: the gas is funneling, like water down a drain, into the gravitational pit of a black hole as massive as 2 million suns...
...telescope measured the velocity of gases swirling closely around the center of M87, an elliptical galaxy in the Virgo cluster, about 50 million light-years away from Earth...
swirling around the center of the M87 galaxy are various fast-moving gases whose speeds can be measured by comparing the shifts in the wavelength of light emitted from the approaching and receding sides of the rotating disk...
...essence the Hubble telescope made an existing argument stronger, since scientists using similar techniques had already suspected the presence of a black hole in the M87 galaxy...
...next step toward understanding the nature of black holes-and perhaps providing stronger proof of their existence to skeptics-is to look for phenomena similar to the M87 gas mass in other galaxies, scientists...