Friday, February 26, 2010

Time Delayed Gravitational Olympics

Now, from the center of our galaxy, transmission delayed approximately 25,000 years, the "How quickly can you orbit the Central Black Hole?"

SO-16 makes an amazing tight corner, but SO-02 closes the loop and takes the gold!

I have requested a better sense of scale, but this is Freaking Awesome! As best as I can tell from Dan at Cosmic Variance, this is not an artist's conception, but an actual movie made of actual images from actual telescopes. According to comment #11, SO-16 comes within 45 AU of the CBH, and reaches 4% of light speed as it carves that corner.

Beat that, Apollo.

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