Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Oct 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006cqgra..23.6083e&link_type=abstract
Classical and Quantum Gravity, Volume 23, Issue 20, pp. 6083 (2006).
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Scientific paper
'The Black Hole at the Center of the Milky Way' collects and presents recent advances in galactic centre research in a unified form by some of the researches at the forefront of the field. This book presents an opportunity to review the observational evidence for the best constrained black hole candidate currently known. In my opinion, the authors succeed in producing a good topical reference, appropriate for advanced students and working researchers, providing and excellent summary of the state of near-infrared results in particular.
While the title refers exclusively to the supermassive black hole associated with the compact radio source Sagittarius A*, the text has a broader focus, discussing the nuclear region of the galaxy. Indeed, this is necessary given that most of the restrictions upon the characteristics of the central supermassive black hole have been obtained indirectly via stellar observations in it's vicinity. This also has the virtue of introducing a number of interesting additional astrophysical mysteries associated with the galactic centre (e.g. the so-called 'paradox of youth', referring to the presence of excessively young stars).
The first section of the book contains a primer on the astronomical techniques applied to the galactic Centre. As with the rest of the text, the discussion of near-infrared techniques dominates, providing only a short summary of radio interferometry, and optical through gamma-ray techniques. While this primer is a useful introduction for the working researcher, or advanced student, it is not exhaustive and thus presumes at least a passing familiarity with the methods discussed.
The second and third sections are devoted to a summary of observations and their astrophysical interpretation, respectively. Necessarily there is considerable overlap between these and they may have benefited from being combined. Nevertheless, each subsection is relatively self-contained which, when combined with the numerous data and graphs collected in the appendices, make this a valuable reference.
As explicitly stated in the foreword, the text can not be complete, owing to the rapidity with which the field is advancing. To address this the authors maintain a website associated with the book containing links to recent publications. The success of the webpage will depend upon the familiarity of the reader with the field, as the material has not been presented in a digested, pedagogical form. The incompleteness is my only substantive criticism of the book, given the exciting recent developments (improved constraints upon the physical size of Sagittarius A*, new polarization measurements of flares, etc) a revised edition may be in order.
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