Tag: Star System

In an unprecedented discovery, astronomers led by Florian Peißker from the University of Cologne, Germany, have identified a binary star system named D9 orbiting the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way. This groundbreaking find, published in Nature Communications, unravels mysteries surrounding hypervelocity stars and the extreme environment near black holes. Binary star systems, where two stars orbit each other, are common in the universe, but none have been observed near a supermassive black hole until now. Using the Very Large Telescope, the team detected D9 through subtle shifts in its starlight, known as the Doppler effect, confirming its binary nature. The D9 system, approximately 2.7 million years old, likely formed elsewhere in the galaxy bef...