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taikonauts redux and a big black hole

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Written by staff
Wednesday, 26 October 2005
>taikonauts redux After five days in orbit, China’s second manned space flight came to a harmonious conclusion with a safe return to Earth on Oct. 17. Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng, the two taikonauts carried into space by Shenzhou VI, parachuted down into inner Mongolia in their re-entry capsule without injury. The orbital module will remain in orbit for at least another six months, according to space.com. “This is an important event that will test the capability of the orbital module, to keep it working for a long time in space,” said Liu Junze, the aircraft controlling office director at Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center, in an interview with China Central Television. “It will also lay the foundations for space station designs in the future.” >big hole In some circles, it’s common knowledge: at the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole with a mass of two million suns. It’s just hunkered down there, sucking everything in like a big fat spider. It’s another thing to see it, though, or, at least, to see a star whipping around the black hole in a very, very tight orbit, with a period of only 15 years. That’s a timeframe so short that a team of international physicists, led by members of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, were able to put together a video clip of the star’s movement—not a simulation, mind you, but a sequence of photographs from 1992 to 2002 showing this star orbiting a great and malevolent blackness. Check it out at www.eso.org/outreach/-press-rel/pr-2002/pr-17-02.html. There’s a direct video link at www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2002/video/vid-02-02.mpg.

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