One Star Flies Past the Milky Way's Black Hole at 3% the Speed of Light - by spacewriter
Why are the stars in the cluster zipping around like bees near a hive? It’s all really just orbital mechanics. An orbiting object’s speed is affected by the mass of the object being orbited and the radius of the orbiting body. In this case, we use the mass of the black hole and the radius of the star’s orbit. Sag A* has a mass of about 4.1 million solar masses. That generates a tremendous gravitational pull, which affects the orbit of anything nearby.
Researchers at the University of Cologne and Masaryk University in Brno observed the star and analyzed their data to figure out its orbital radius and speed. That’s how they clocked it moving at a very small fraction of the speed of light.To get their observations, the astronomers used five telescopes on Mauna Kea and in Chili, equipped with special instruments that let them measure the star’s motion. They combined four of these telescopes into one giant eye on the sky to get more details.
One question that astronomers keep asking is how these stars got so close to the black hole. It’s not likely they formed there since the action of the black hole disrupts star-forming factories. That prevents stars from being born in the near vicinity of Sag A*. But, there’s another explanation. “The short-period, compact orbit of S4716 is quite puzzling,” said team member Michael Zajacek, an astrophysicist at Masaryk University. “Stars cannot form so easily near the black hole.
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