This ball of gas is racing around the black hole at our galaxy’s heart

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/ball-gas-racing-around-black-hole-our-galaxy-s-heart

Source:  By Daniel Clery, Science Magazine.

Excerpt: Earlier this year, astronomers were looking for signs that S2, the star with the closest known orbit to the supermassive black hole thought to be at the center of the Milky Way, might—as predicted by Albert Einstein—deviate from the orbital path proscribed by Newtonian gravity. But while they were watching, they spied something else: three bright infrared flares unrelated to the star ...the signs of superheated gas racing almost as close to the black hole as possible without getting sucked in—at 30% the speed of light. Observing the action so close to the galactic center, known as Sagittarius A*, is extremely challenging because it is distant, small, and shrouded in gas and dust. The team used the world’s largest optical instrument, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, and combined the light of its four 8.2-meter mirrors to get the resolution of a 130-meter virtual telescope using a new instrument called GRAVITY. ...the three flares move in small 45-minute orbits, and ...scientists calculated that this must be material circulating around the black hole, just outside the closest orbit in which objects can move without being sucked in....

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