Astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. A binary star system, consisting of two stars gravitationally bound to each other around a common center of gravity, has been confirmed in the vicinity of Sagittarius A*, a black hole about 26,000 light-years from Earth.
The discovery was made possible by advances in telescope technology and follows a hypothesis first proposed nearly a century ago. American engineer Karl Jansky accidentally stumbled upon Sagittarius A* while researching radio signals between Europe and the United States in the 1930s.
Follow-up observations revealed bright emissions coming from the region, but scientists at the time couldn’t determine what the source was. It wasn’t until the 1990s that researchers documented detailed observations of stars orbiting the emission, marking the first time stars were observed near a supermassive black hole.
Since stars typically form in pairs or triplets, astronomers deduced that binary star systems were likely orbiting near the black hole. The discovery was confirmed using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, one of the world’s most advanced optical telescopes.
The binary star system is part of a larger region known as the S-cluster, which contains high-velocity stars and other dusty objects. Researchers believe that the binary star system will merge soon, with the single resulting star emerging from the collision.
The discovery provides significant insights into the evolution of our galaxy and may shed light on similar systems in other galaxies, including the Andromeda galaxy, which is about 2.5 million light-years away.
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/binary-star-system-found-milky-way-black-hole/story?id=116763825