This Star Whips Around the Milky Way’s Black Hole Faster and Closer Than Any Other Known Star
The universe is full of cool and interesting things, like black hole stars and nightmare planets that get scorched by their host star. Now researchers have found a star that moves ridiculously fast, and it’s right in our celestial backyard, whipping around the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole.
Say hello to S301, a star near the center of our galaxy that was discovered by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. It joins the massive catalog of more than 1.8 billion stars, but it has some properties that researchers believe make it special. The first, and most obvious, thing about S301 is that it’s the fastest-moving celestial object ever observed by science.
This superswift star hits a peak speed of around 15,500 miles per second, or about 55.8 million miles per hour. That happens, researchers say, after S301 accelerates as it nears Sagittarius A*, the black...
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