This afternoon I worked together with Annemarie on the third project for Astronomical Practicum. This project is about the galaxy M87 and its supermassive black hole (SMBH). The information we have are line of sight velocities of gas near the core of M87. And out of that we can calculate the mass of the black hole. After about a little more than three hours of calculating I came to a preliminary result of 3.5 billion solar masses, which is very close to the value I found on the internet being 3 billion solar masses :).

Even when I was riding back home on my bike, I was still calculating some stuff… Actually… I was so concentrated on my bike that I wasn’t paying attention to where I was riding that I hit a curbstone and got myself a flat tire… ‘pfffffffffffffffffffffff’ it said… :|… Had to do the rest on foot. Well… that gave me some more time to do the necessary calculations in my head ;).

Tomorrow we’ll continue with a more detailed analysis by fitting a curve to the velocity profile of the gas with a computer program and calculating the best curve and therefore the mass that fits the observations best ;).

You can sleep now, noodle :D.