Speaker
Frank Eisenhauer
(MPE)
Description
GRAVITY is a new instrument to combine the four 8m ESO Very Large Telescopes in Chile. Providing precision astrometry of order 10 microarcseconds and infrared imaging with 4-milliarcsecond resolution, GRAVITY will address a number of fundamental open questions on the Galactic Center black hole and its surrounding: What is the nature of its flares? What is the spin of the black hole? How can we resolve the “Paradox of Youth” of the stars in its vicinity? Even tests of fundamental physics may come into reach with GRAVITY: Does general relativity hold in the strong field around the super-massive black hole? Do black holes really have “no hair”? Our presentation will introduce the GRAVITY instrument and show how we want to answer these questions by precision measurements of stellar orbits and by observing the motion of matter close to the last stable orbit.
Author
Frank Eisenhauer
(MPE)