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We Just Found The Fastest Star With Shortest Orbital Period

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The fastest known star runs at the speed of 8000 kilometers per second and moves around a black hole in the shortest possible time.

Researchers from the University of Cologne and Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) have identified the fastest star ever discovered, which orbits around a black hole in the least amount of time imaginable.

The star designated S4716, travels at a speed of almost 8000 kilometers per second as it rounds Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way, in four years.

S4716 is only 100 AU (Astronomical Units) away from the black hole, which is near proximity by astronomical standards. One AU equals 149,597,870 kilometers. The results of the investigation were reported in The Astrophysical Journal.

Our galaxy’s central black hole is surrounded by a densely packed star cluster. More than a hundred stars in this cluster, often known as the S cluster, range in brightness and mass. S stars move incredibly quickly.

According to Dr. Florian Peißker, the main author of the new study, “A prominent representative, S2, behaves like a large person who sits in front of you in the cinema: it blocks your view of the essentials.”

Therefore, S2 frequently blocks the view into the center of our galaxy. There are, however, tiny windows of time when we can look at the region around the main black hole.

Scientists have been able to find a star that orbits the central supermassive black hole in just four years. This has been made possible by the steady improvement of analytical methods and observations that have been going on for almost twenty years.

Five telescopes have looked at the star, and four of them are linked together to make one big telescope that can look at the star even more accurately and in more detail.

“The fact that a star in a stable orbit is so close and fast around a supermassive black hole is completely unexpected,” according to Peißker, “and marks the limit that can be observed with traditional telescopes.”

The discovery also provides new insight into the beginning and development of the orbits of the fast-moving stars that make up the Milky Way’s core. According to Michal Zajaek, an astrophysicist at Masaryk University in Brno who was part in the investigation, “The short-period, compact orbit of S4716 is quite puzzling”.

“Stars cannot form so easily near the black hole. S4716 had to migrate inward,” adds Zajaček, “for example through a series of approaches to other stars and objects in the S cluster, which significantly reduced its orbit.”

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