A newly discovered star is so close to our galaxy's central supermassive black hole that it completes an orbit in just four years.
That star, called S2, is just one of a group of stars known as S-stars, which follow long, sharply elliptical orbits around Sgr A*, with the black hole at one end of the ellipse. That end, at which the star is closest to the black hole, is
"S2 behaves like a large person sitting in front of you in a movie theater: It blocks your view of what's important," The team calculated that its periapse was about 15 billion kilometers from the supermassive black hole, about 100 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. As it approaches and enters periapse, the star reaches a velocity of about 8,000 kilometers per second.That's not the closest, nor the fastest, S star in the galactic center. That honor belongs to a star named S4714,, which comes as close to Sgr A* as 1.9 billion kilometers, reaching velocities up to 24,000 kilometers per second.
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