That was completely unexpected.
The vast expanse of our universe means that astronomers always find something they have never seen before. Earlier this week, astronomers spottedheading toward Earth, which will pass at distances just a quarter of what separates the Moon from us.
Apart from asteroids, our galaxy is also of special interest to astronomers looking for signs of other planets supporting life. Right at the center of the Milky Way though, there is a supermassive black hole that has been dubbed Sagittarius A* or Sgr A* and S4716 is orbiting this black hole at a fierce pace. From the observations made so far, we know that at 5,000 miles a second or 18 million miles per hour, S4716 is the fastest star orbiting Sgr A*. It completes an orbit around the 14.
However, S2's orbit around the black hole takes 16 years and it comes as close as 11 billion miles from Sgr A*. In comparison, S4716 comes as close as 92 million miles to the black hole, that's about 100 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.The discovery of a star so close to a black hole could change our understanding of the evolution of our galaxy and its fast-moving stars.
"The short-period, compact orbit of S4716 is quite puzzling," said Michael Zajaček, an astrophysicist at Masaryk University in acannot form so easily near the black hole. S4716 had to move inwards, for example by approaching other stars and objects in the S cluster, which caused its orbit to shrink significantly."While S2 has helped us understand more details about Sgr A*, it has disadvantages.
S2 behaves like a large person sitting in front of you in a movie theater — it blocks your view of what's important. The view into the center of our galaxy is therefore often obscured by S2,Florian Peissker, an astrophysicist at the University of Cologne, which was involved in this research, in a statement.
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