We Have a New Record For The Fastest Star Zooming Around a Supermassive Black Hole

The newly discovered star is so close to the black hole that it completes an elliptical path in four years.

There is a star looping around the Sagittarius A*. It takes the star 2.5 percent of the speed of light to travel around the black hole.

New information about the dynamics of the center of the Milky Way has been discovered.

The environment around Sgr A* is an extreme kind of place. The black hole is four million times the mass of the Sun. Scientists inferred its presence and calculated its mass based on a star in the Sgr A* area.

A group of stars known as S-stars follow a long elliptical path around Sgr A* with a black hole at one end. The way stars change their velocities as they move into and out of periapse is one of the tools used to weigh the black hole.

There are many stars at the party.

The team of astrophysicists led by Peissker at the University of Cologne have been looking to see what else they can find.

Peissker said that S2 blocks your view of what's important and behaves like a large person sitting in front of you. S2 obscures the view into the center of our universe. We can see the surroundings of the central black hole in a short time.

Several S stars are in the center of the universe. The article was written by Peissker and his colleagues.

The evolution of observation and analysis techniques allowed researchers to discover this star. Data from five different instruments showed that it was visible.

The periapse was about 100 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. The star has a speed of about 8,000 kilometers per second as it approaches.

That isn't the closest or the fastest star in the center of the universe. Peissker and his colleagues discovered a star named S4776 which is close to Sgr A* in size and speed.

There is a period of 12 years for S 4741. The mean distance to the black hole has been found to be the shortest of any of the S stars.

Peissker said that the star in the vicinity of a black hole marks the limit that can be observed with traditional telescopes.

Several observations attributed to other S stars were found to be different. It's not clear how S4716 ended up there. Some more work may be needed to solve this.

Michael Zajaek is an astronomer at Masaryk University in Czechia.

There is a black hole. S4716 had to move inwards to get around other stars and objects in the S cluster.

The research is in a journal.