Called S4714, this star reaches a speed close to 8 percent that of light, at an impressive 15,000 miles per second.
The five stars that the authors report having recently sighted at the galactic center have short orbital periods, starting at 7.6 Earth years. All of them measure between 2.0 and 2.8 solar masses and are at the detection limit
A group of astrophysicists at the University of Cologne, Germany, has detected several unknown stars very close to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A *, and they say that one of them is the fastest star ever seen.
This discovery not only suggests that there are more stars in eccentric orbits around the Milky Way’s nerve center, but also provides the first candidates for a type of star theoretically proposed almost 20 years ago: the “squeezars.” The term comes from English squeeze (to squeeze) and stars (stars), and refers to the enormous tidal forces to which they are subjected in the vicinity of a black hole.
New Galactic Record
For years, another star, known as S2 and one of the brightest in the same star cluster, was considered the closest to the supermassive black hole. At the moment of its closest approach, the periapsis, its orbit is about 10 billion kilometers from Sagittarius A * and it is moving at 3% of the speed of light.
But now German researchers point to S4714 as having set a new space speed record, making it one of the “perfect candidates for observing the gravitational effects and properties of the colossal, invisible object they orbit.”
Several years of observations from the Paranal hill (Chile), where the VLT telescope of the European Southern Observatory is located, have shown that at a certain moment this last star passes 1.9 billion kilometers from Sagittarius A * and that is when it accelerates to its maximum, reaching 8% the speed of light.
The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Source: ScienceAlert
