Tuesday, December 9, 2008

milky way super cute black hole

From BBC News: Black hole found in Milky Way

Kickass! They found our black hole. Apparently it's 4 million times heavier than the Sun and 27,000 light years away. I wanted to calculate the mass, but the mass of the sun has thirty zeros and I can't deal with that. Instead, I'll compare it to the mass of the Sun as compared to the mass of the Earth. The Sun has the mass of 332,946 Earths, so our black hole is... 1,331,784,000,000 Earths. I think that's right.

What should we call it? Milky Way Black Hole is pretty long. I was thinking "the Milky Hole," but I realized that just sounded really dirty.

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