Paris (France) (AFP) – Astronomers have discovered the fastest star in the Milky Way zooming at 25,000 kilometres a second around the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
Issued on: 20/08/2026 - 16:50
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The star, named S301, orbits so dangerously close to the black hole that scientists believe it can shed light on this unimaginably powerful cosmic monster -- and test out Albert Einstein's theory of relativity."Decades carefully tracking stars orbiting our galaxy's central black hole, Sagittarius A*, have led to this breakthrough discovery," Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany said in a statement."Because it orbits so close to Sagittarius A*, S301 opens a new window to the fundamental properties of spacetime in this extreme black-hole environment," added Genzel, who shared a 2020 physics Nobel prize for discovering the black hole.To spot S301 -- which is two billion times fainter than the star Betelgeuse in our sky -- the team of astronomers used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in the Chilean desert.They first noticed the star in 2023, and have been tracking its orbit since."What is special about this star is that it's orbiting Sagittarius A* on a very tight orbit, taking just 8.7 years to complete it," explained Felix Mang, a co-author of a new study describing the discovery.The star gets roughly as close to the black hole as Saturn gets to our Sun, which is "unprecedented", the PhD student emphasised.Torn from its partnerWhen the star gets closest to the immense suck of the black hole, it is travelling around 25,000 kilometres per second (15,500 miles per second).
