Ok, so I’m still dreadfully behind on updating this page, but I wanted to mention our new paper that came out last week (30 August) in Science: Wang, Nowak, Markoff et al., “Dissecting X-ray–Emitting Gas Around the Center of Our Galaxy”. Here’s the link if you have access otherwise it’s on astroph. The paper is very exciting, from our massive 3Msec campaign with the Chandra X-ray Observatory on the super massive black hole in the center of our Galaxy, Sgr A*. That’s a whopping 35 days of observations on an instrument where in the past we normally would get a few days a year. So in one year we doubled the photon count of the last decade practically. This time we also used the spectral gratings for the first time. Not only are we able to image the accretion flow in the X-ray band, something that’s only possible for about 2 black holes in the universe with today’s technology, but we also got high quality line diagnostics to constrain all sorts of things about the accreting plasma we really need to understand as inputs for our theories. Unfortunately the quote they gave me in the various press releases is a bit goofy, I talk about how “cool” the image is (it’s actually quite hot!) and although in some versions I qualify that this is because we can actually see that the accreting plasma has the same alignment as the stellar disk we thought might be feeding it, thus clinching the source, in other versions they just leave it at “cool”. Oh well, no one ever said I was particularly high brow…
Here’s the PR image of the stars feeding the disk, to compare with the real image:
