WSU astronomer explains black holes

Around midnight some balmy summer night, when the moon isn't out and the stars are brilliant, look toward the south. Pay special attention to Sagittarius, where the Milky Way reaches the horizon, a constellation with the familiar asterism nicknamed the Teapot.

You will be staring in the direction of what Stacy Palen calls "the monster in the middle of our galaxy."

The monster is a supermassive black hole, this one technically known as Sagittarius A* (with the asterisk pronounced "star"). Its existence was confirmed in 1999 by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, an orbiting detector able to peer through the dust that obscures the center of our galaxy.

Black holes are objects so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape from them. Some are thought to form when large stars implode and the material keeps on condensing. Black holes are so bizarre that they warp space and time.

Material captured in the gravity sink of a black hole may rotate around it in an accretion disk before falling in. Some black holes have jets of material flying away from the accretion disk.

Photos of stars orbiting the Milky Way's "monster" show enough motion that scientists were able to calculate the mass of the black hole that has captured them, said Palen, an assistant professor of physics at Weber State University.

The director of WSU's Ott Planetarium, Palen earned her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Iowa. She has traveled the world doing astronomical research, has published a study guide to astronomy and is a dynamic lecturer.

The Milky Way monster has as much mass as 2.6 million of our suns would have, she said. All of it is in a small realm at the middle of our home galaxy.

"Astronomers, of course, wander around sockless all the time because they keep getting their socks knocked off," she said.

Palen spoke last week in a lecture at Clark Planetarium, located at The Gateway, 110 S. 400 West. Her talk marked the premiere of a production by the planetarium, "Black Holes," narrated by the actor John de Lancie, who played the character "Q" in the TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

The 35-minute digital film was written, directed and produced in the planetarium's studios, says a press release sent by spokeswoman Marit Fischer. It "will be distributed worldwide and has been pre-sold to a number of theaters, even before the debut," Fischer wrote.

"Black Holes" plays twice daily at the planetarium, according to the facility's Web site.