Artist’s illustration of a black gap. A star was found zipping across the black gap on the heart of our galaxy, the Milky Way, at an astonishing velocity of 8,000 km/s.
A newly found star solely takes 4 years to journey across the black gap on the heart of our Milky Way.
Astronomers have found the quickest recognized star, which travels round a black hole in record time. The star, S4716, orbits Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the center of our galaxy, in four years and reaches a speed of around 8,000 kilometers per second (5,000 miles per second) which is about 30 million kilometers per hour (18 million miles per hour).
S4716 comes as close as 100 AU (astronomical unit) to the black hole – a small distance by astronomical standards. One AU is the approximate mean distance from the Earth to the Sun and corresponds to 149,597,871 kilometers (92,955,807 miles). The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Cologne and Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) and published on July 5, 2022, in The Astrophysical Journal.
In the area near the black hole at the center of our galaxy is a densely packed cluster of stars. This cluster, called the S cluster, is home to well over a hundred stars that differ in their brightness and mass. S stars move particularly fast.
“One prominent member, S2, behaves like a large person sitting in front of you in a movie theater: it blocks your view of what’s important,” said Dr. Florian Peissker, lead author of the new study. “The view into the center of our galaxy is therefore often obscured by S2. However, in brief moments we can observe the surroundings of the central black hole.”
Stars within the S cluster orbit the black gap on the heart of our galaxy at nice velocity. S4716 is the quickest. Credit: Florian Peissker, University of Cologne
By technique of repeatedly refining strategies of study, along with observations spanning virtually twenty years, the astronomers have now recognized surely a star that travels across the central supermassive black gap in simply 4 years. In complete, 5 telescopes noticed the star, with 4 of those 5 being mixed into one giant telescope to permit much more correct and detailed observations.
“For a star to be in a stable orbit so close and fast in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole was completely unexpected and marks the limit that can be observed with traditional telescopes,” mentioned Peissker.
The Ok-band view of the GC noticed with NIRC2 (Keck) in 2019.30. This picture is high-pass filtered and reveals the place of a number of S stars near Sgr A*, which is indicated by a black cross. The star within the white dashed circle reveals a Ok-band magnitude of 16.three magazine, whereas the star within the blue circle is 17.zero magazine faint. Both Ok-band magnitudes are in keeping with the reported values for S62 by Peißker et al. (2020a) and people for S29 by Gillessen et al. (2017) and Peißker et al. (2021b). Here North is up and east is to the left. Credit: The Astrophysical Journal, DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac752f
Moreover, the invention sheds new gentle on the origin and evolution of the orbit of fast-moving stars within the coronary heart of the Milky Way. “The short-period, compact orbit of S4716 is quite puzzling,” Michael Zajacek, an astrophysicist at Masaryk University in Brno who was involved in the study, said. “Stars cannot 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,” he added.
Reference: “Observation of S4716—a Star with a 4 yr Orbit around Sgr A*” by Florian Peißker, Andreas Eckart, Michal Zajacek and Silke Britzen, 5 July 2022, The Astrophysical Journal.
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac752f
