БЛОГ

Feb 12, 2020

Astronomers find a star dive-bombing our galaxy’s supermassive black hole

Posted by in category: cosmology

At the center of our galaxy lies Sgr A — a supermassive black hole. With over 4 million times the Sun’s mass, you can see why it gets that moniker.

One reason we know its mass is that there’s a cluster of young, luminous stars orbiting around it. These are called S stars, and they form a group around the black hole about a quarter of a light year across — a few trillion kilometers. One of these stars, S2, has an elliptical orbit that takes it to a distance of just 16 billion kilometers from the black hole as it travels on its elliptical orbit. Until recently, that star had the closest encounter we knew of.

Comments are closed.