At the center of the Milky Way , resides a supermassive opprobrious hole known asSagittarius A * . It weighs over 4 million times our Sun . There are a handful of stars that orb pretty confining to this behemoth and now we have the deepest , clearest ikon of them yet . pull in over several months , these range of a function revealed young views of the motions of the stars around Sagittarius A * and even spotted an wholly one .
These ace are called S - stars and they have wild , long cranial orbit , claim between 14 and 18 years to complete a turn around Sgr A * . Published in two papers ( hereandhere ) in Astronomy & Astrophysics , the team ’s observations revealed the tightlipped and fastest a star has ever been observed going around a black hollow . observe between March and July 2021 , star S29 was just 13 billion kilometer ( 8 billion miles ) away from Sgr A * , about 90 times the Sun - Earth distance . It was moving at an unbelievable focal ratio of 8,740 kilometer ( 5430 geographical mile ) per secondly .
They also identified a antecedently unknown whizz , now known as S300 . read the motion of these stars is an excellent proxy for dig into the properties of the supermassive fatal jam , allowing astronomers to refine estimation for hoi polloi and aloofness .
“ We require to study more about the black hole at the midpoint of the Milky Way , Sagittarius A * : How massive is it precisely ? Does it spread out ? Do stars around it behave exactly as we expect from Einstein ’s worldwide hypothesis of relativity theory ? " Colorado - author Reinhard Genzel , a film director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics ( MPE ) , pronounce in astatement .
" The good way of life to answer these motion is to follow stars on orbits close to the supermassive black hole . And here we demonstrate that we can do that to a high precision than ever before . ”
In these observations , the squad confirmed the movement of several previously known stars , such asS62but also discovered new single like S300 . The orbits also allowed for the most precise measurements of the mass of the black hole , at 4.3 million times our Sun , and its length from Earth , at 27,000 calorie-free - years aside .
The team , known as the GRAVITY collaboration , used the European Southern Observatory ’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer to obtain these deepest double of the galactic center , developing a new analysis technique that allowed them to surge 20 times deep than previously potential .
Incredible though that is , when the Extremely tumid Telescope ( ELT ) based in Chile comes online in a few years , the collaboration will become GRAVITY+ and deliver even more elaborated analyses .
