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You sort of have to read between the lines with popular science reporting. Prior to the event, the gas cloud was spotted and it was big news in the media as thi

You sort of have to read between the lines with popular science reporting. Prior to the event, the gas cloud was spotted and it was big news in the media as this would effectively be an empirical test of black hole theory and we'd get to see it in action. But the event came and went and nothing remarkable happened. You had to look it up to find out what ended up happening because it wasn't widely reported. We're still trying to come up with answers for why the experiment didn't turn out as expected. So we either don't understand the gas cloud or our SgA* black hole model isn't correct (or some combination of both.) In either case, we seemed quite sure prior to the event. I think anomalies like this are where the really interesting information lies and we should be more humble wrt the veracity of our current models.

cthalupa 2y ago
You're making a lot of arguments and linking a lot of things that are only loosely related and definitely are not actually supporting evidence for your argument.This article (and event in general) also have very little to say about whether or not black holes exist. The galactic center is one of the noisiest portions of the galaxy and most difficult for us to look at. (Relatively) high densities of gas further obscure things within them. It's a pretty huge leap to go from the fairly obvious answer - we weren't quite right about everything inside of G2 - to "Black holes as we think of them don't exist." And, the most recent evidence we have is... that we got the composition of G2 wrong. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.04543 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.04543