Big news from the heart of our galaxy! 🌀 An international team of researchers has discovered a binary star—a pair of stars orbiting each other—right next to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way. This is the first time such a stellar duo has been spotted in this extreme environment.
Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), scientists not only learned more about how stars survive near these gravitational giants but also found clues about how planets might someday be discovered in these intense regions.
“Black holes aren’t as destructive as we thought,” says Florian Peißker, lead researcher from the University of Cologne. And he’s right—binary stars should be shaky, unstable messes near a black hole, but D9, the newly discovered system, is thriving (for now).
Here’s the kicker—this system is only about 2.7 million years old (practically a baby in cosmic terms), but Sagittarius A*’s intense gravity is expected to merge the two stars into one within just a million years! Talk about a ticking cosmic clock.
Emma Bordier, a researcher on the team, calls this discovery a rare glimpse into a fleeting moment in the universe’s history. “We succeeded in catching it just in time,” she says.
For years, scientists assumed new stars couldn’t form near supermassive black holes because the conditions are just, well… brutal. But young stars close to Sagittarius A* and now the discovery of this young binary system are proving that theory wrong.
The D9 system seems to be surrounded by gas and dust, evidence that it likely formed right in this hostile neighborhood. Think of it as a stellar survival story—scrappy stars born in the shadows of one of the universe’s most dangerous forces.
Even cooler? D9 was found in the S cluster—a dense group of stars and mysterious objects orbiting close to Sagittarius A*. Among them are the enigmatic “G objects,” strange entities that act like stars but look like clouds of gas. Discovering D9 has sparked a new theory that these G objects might actually be leftover material from merged binary stars, or they could be binaries themselves that haven’t merged yet.
The team’s discovery is just part of a bigger puzzle about what’s happening near Sagittarius A*. With upcoming advancements like the GRAVITY+ upgrade and ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in the works, scientists expect to uncover even more secrets about our galaxy’s chaotic core—including (fingers crossed) spotting planets around these young stars.
“It’s only a matter of time before we detect planets in the galactic center,” says Peißker.
The universe never stops surprising us, does it? ✨
Reference: Florian Peißker et al, A binary system in the S cluster close to the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-54748-3