Astronomers recently discovered the fastest moving star in the Universe, S4716, which orbits a black hole at extreme speed.
S4716 orbits Sagittarius A black hole, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Sagittarius A is about 23.5 million kilometers across, and astronomers discovered that S4716 orbits it in every four years, which may seem like a long time, but this is the shortest orbital period out of all stars.
Using these statistics, Researchers found that this star travels extremely fast at around 18 million miles per hour (29 million kilometers per hour), or approximately 5000 miles per second.
S4716 was discovered by researchers at the University of Cologne and Masaryk University. It took many resources to discover the star, as five telescopes alone were needed to observe it, and a few of the telescopes were combined for more accurate descriptions and observations. The telescopes are NIR2, OSIRIS, SINFONI, NACO, and GRAVITY.
It took 20 years of study to find an approximate speed of S4716, but the researchers also managed to find other statistics about it, such as the closest distance between the star and the black hole, which is 100 astronomical units or 14,959,787,000 kilometers. While this number seems large, it is considered a small distance in Astronomy.
“For a star to be in a stable orbit so close and fast in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole was completely unexpected and marks the limit that can be observed with traditional telescopes,” said Dr. Florian Peissker, leader of the study.
S4716 orbits Sagittarius A black hole, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Sagittarius A is about 23.5 million kilometers across, and astronomers discovered that S4716 orbits it in every four years, which may seem like a long time, but this is the shortest orbital period out of all stars.
Using these statistics, Researchers found that this star travels extremely fast at around 18 million miles per hour (29 million kilometers per hour), or approximately 5000 miles per second.
S4716 was discovered by researchers at the University of Cologne and Masaryk University. It took many resources to discover the star, as five telescopes alone were needed to observe it, and a few of the telescopes were combined for more accurate descriptions and observations. The telescopes are NIR2, OSIRIS, SINFONI, NACO, and GRAVITY.
It took 20 years of study to find an approximate speed of S4716, but the researchers also managed to find other statistics about it, such as the closest distance between the star and the black hole, which is 100 astronomical units or 14,959,787,000 kilometers. While this number seems large, it is considered a small distance in Astronomy.
“For a star to be in a stable orbit so close and fast in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole was completely unexpected and marks the limit that can be observed with traditional telescopes,” said Dr. Florian Peissker, leader of the study.
