What does it feel like to zoom around a spinning
supermassive black hole?
The
featured video is an animation showing a time-l/day/se of 4 years of observations of the star S301 orbiting
Sagittarius A*, the 4-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of our Galaxy.
S301 was
discovered in 2023 with the
Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the
European Southern Observatory, located in the
Atacama Desert in Chile.
Astronomers
recently found that S301 takes approximately 8.7 years to go around the black hole and reaches speeds of 25,000 km/s.
It comes closer to the black hole than any
other stars detected before, at a distance similar to that from
Saturn to the
Sun.
Because it comes
so close to Sagittarius A*, S301 could be used to directly measure how fast the black hole spins and test
Einstein's theory of
general relativity.
According to the theory, a spinning black hole
drags the fabric of spacetime around itself, affecting the orbits of close-by objects.