The Galaxy’s Fastest Star Could Reveal the Secrets of a Supermassive Black Hole
A team of astronomers has just detected the fastest star in the galaxy. Its anomalous speed has a more unsettling explanation: It orbits Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, the mass of which is equivalent to four million times that of the Sun.
S301, as astronomers have named the star, reaches 25,000 kilometers per second (km/s) at its maximum speed and takes 8.7 years to complete one orbit around Sagittarius A*. (By comparison, the Sun orbits the center of the galaxy at about 230 km/s.) At its peak speed, S301 moves more than 100 times faster than our star, and reaches 8 percent of the speed of light.
The key to S301’s speed lies in how close it passes to the supermassive black hole. According to the European Southern Observatory (ESO), at its closest approach, the distance between the two is comparable...
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