Supermassive Black Hole Caught Sucking Energy From Nearby Starlight

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The event, recorded in incredible detail, reveals how the extreme gravitational pull of a black hole affects light.

Einstein suspected that a black hole might be powerful enough to lower the frequency of light under extreme circumstances, and once again his theory has withstood the test. The announcement was made at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) headquarters in Garching, Germany. At the press conference, ESO researcher Frank Eisenhuer compared the predicted redshift as outlined by Einstein to what was observed – with the data aligning near perfectly. The crowd broke

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Gravitational redshift happens as light travels across gravitational fields and loses some of its energy, causing it to shift toward the red, or lower, end of the spectrum. As the light increasingly feels the pull of gravity, it must work harder to keep at a constant speed. So rather than oscillating at its original frequency, its wavelength is stretched in a way, becoming longer.

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They watched what happened as S2 approached the black hole, coming tantalizing close, cosmically speaking, at about 12 billion miles away. During this close encounter, S2 reached speeds of nearly 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) per second, which is equal to 2.7% the speed of light.

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“We looked at our galactic center and what we saw, is yes, it behaves like Einstein’s black hole. What we measured cannot be described by Newton anymore.”



Very Large Telescope array (VLT)



Sagittarius A*