A star so close to the Milky Way’s black hole it feels its spin

By Dr. Becky

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We thought this was the closest star to the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, turns out we were wrong! It’s actually this one, S301. It’s 2 billion times fainter than the brightest stars in the night sky, it comes closer to the black hole at the centre than Uranus does to the Sun, travelling at 25,000 km/s - that’s 8% of the speed of light! But it’s not getting torn apart, or sucked in. It’s on a stable orbit. And that is really, really good news for us astrophysicists. Because with this star we should be able to directly measure how fast the Milky Way’s black hole is spinning for the first time. Because: mass, spin, and charge, those are the only three properties that black holes have. And we’ve only ever directly measured one of them for the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. But all that is about to change... But why do we even care about spin? Well that’s something we’re going to dive into in this video, along with how we measure black hole spin including dire

Tags: dr beccy, astronomie, physiks