The Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole located at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy is a true two-edged cosmic sword. While anything that gets too close will be trapped for eternity, the black hole also has the beneficial roles of recycling space debris, stabilizing galaxy formation, as well as defining the shape of the Milky Way galaxy itself.
According to space.com, astronomers have now discovered S4716, the fastest star that is hurtling around the Sagittarius A* black hole. The star even comes at just 9.2 billion miles close to the black hole, which means a very short distance in astronomical terms.
Completing a full orbit in only four years
The S4716 star needs only four years to complete a full orbit around the supermassive black hole located at the heart of our galaxy. That’s three times the amount of time planet Jupiter needs to complete a full orbit around our Sun. Astronomers had been using five telescopes to gather data about S4716: the Keck observatory’s NIR2 and OSIRIS, as well as three instruments of the Very Large Telescope from Chile: NACO, SINFONI, and GRAVITY.
However, it is important to keep in mind that astronomers needed about 20 years of observations and gathering enough info to confirm the huge speed that the S4716 star achieved around the black hole: 18 million mph.
Of course, astronomers were amazed to conclude that S4716 has such a orbital period of only 4 years. Michael Zajaček, an astrophysicist from the Masaryk University in Brno, explained as space.com quotes:
The short-period, compact orbit of S4716 is quite puzzling,
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.
The new research was published in The Astrophysical Journal.