Milky Way center before/after comparison

57:22this is how Andrea Gaz won the Nobel Prize. >> This is crazy. For listeners who are not watching the video, and I encourage you to go to YouTube because we always have graphics for this. On the left, it basically looks like a gradient, a red orange gradient with blobs with just it's just a massive 20 blobs. There's no discrete shape of any kind. It's just like a sauce. On the right, you can see very discreet points of light, multiple. There's maybe even in the zoomed in version, right, there's an inset. And you can see in the inset, there's like >> it's incredibly high fidelity comparatively. And and here you're looking you're looking at something called Sagittarius A star and the stars around that compact object.

58:03>> And if we were to make a movie out of this, you'd see all of the stars going around >> around an invisible point. >> Right? And that invisible point is our super massive black hole. >> And that's that's this is why Andrew GZ at UCLA won the Nobel Prize. UCLA has had an incredible history of um imaging >> techniques. Okay, they've they're really good. They've got like two floors dedicated in the um Newton Hall, I think, to just getting imaging to the next level. And this is the next sort of >> I mean LA is the home of Hollywood. So >> it is right. Yeah. So [laughter] that that is that's pretty funny. >> So So you can see now, right? Adaptive

58:43optics is insane. >> Yes. That that's that's a big The the other thing that we can do is not just adaptive optics. We can make the telescope size bigger without actually make the teles making the telescope bigger. The effective size. You've seen this the VA. You've been to the VA. Very large >> um array. Yeah. Very large array in New Mexico. A giant 27 mile long radio telescope made of smaller telescopes that are all coordinated and they can sense the time in which the light came. They can have them interfere. And so the light gathering power is not as much. You're not gathering as much light, >> but your resolution is limited by how far away

59:23your telescopes are. >> Mhm. Mhm. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Now, with radio, it's easier to do because the radio waves are slower. >> Yes. >> With visible light, it's harder. But actually, the gold standard right now is in Mount Wilson. It's called the Cara Array. It's a six six 1 m telescopes all along the mountain that you can see over there. Yes, >> the baseline is 330 m. So about three football fields wide. >> You've it's it's effectively a visible optical light telescope that is 3 football fields wide. >> And with that, >> you can achieve an angular resolution of 0.2 micro arcseconds, which is insane because you can now image other stars

1:00:03like this. >> Like this is a this is a star called Altter. It revolves really fast on its axis, which is why it's got this like really big grapefruit bulge on the equator because it's revolving so fast. >> And because in the equator, you can also see that it's dimmer. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Because like that gas is farther away from the equator compared to the pole. So it's it's a little bit dimmer, >> right? This is a single star that we're imaging like this. >> Yeah. That's that's incredible. >> It's incredible. We've also with um with the Cara array, we've been able to see sunspots on other stars. So, star spots on other stars with the car array. And it was really cool because the last time

1:00:45I went up there was for um one of these