A team of astronomers from the University of California Los Angeles have finally identified the mysterious G2 object near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The team used the twin Keck Telescopes located in Hawaii to focus in on the object and study it. The G2 is located near the heart of our own Milky Way Galaxy, close to the super-massive black hole located in the center.
A team of astronomers from UCLA claim to have identified an object at the center of the G2 Gas Cloud. (Image from Wikipedia)
The G2 object is hidden from view, as it is surrounded by a thick cloud of cosmic dust. Based on the information obtained by the University of California team, they believe that the object is actually an extremely large star. They estimate that the star may be roughly 100 times the size of our own Sun, but consisting of a mass only about twice the amount. This would mean that the star is very bright, but is not very dense by comparison. They believe that the object consists of a central star, due mostly to the fact that G2 survived a close encounter with the black hole in the center of the galaxy. It is assumed that if G2 was simply dust, that the black hole would have attracted it all within it’s gravitational pull.
While they hold firmly to this finding, other astronomers around the world claim that they have misidentified it. Other astronomers, using other observation devices refute the UCLA claim that there is a star located in the center of the massive G2 dust cloud. Some teams have claimed that the dust cloud is nothing more than that, just a cloud of space dust. The truth may be hard to prove, as the objects themselves lie so far away that it would be virtually impossible to travel there to see them up close. The objects are so far away from Earth, that they seem microscopically small from here. This lack of resolution in the observations leaves some data open to interpretation. When scientists are left to distinguish for themselves what to conclude from a set of data, human error and conjecture can lead to flawed conclusions.
Astronomers Identify G2 Object In Galactic Center With Keck Telescopes.
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