Wow, not only have astronomers found a star that comes so close to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy that a detailed study of its orbit over the next decade should be able to quantify the black hole’s spin, there is a chance that future spectroscopic analysis will show that it was once part of a binary pair with a known hypervelocity star moving away from the galaxy’s centre, providing some evidence for the capture/eject Hills mechanism, explaining how stars end up so close to a black hole in the first place.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fastest-known-star-could-reveal-spin-our-galaxy-s-giant-black-hole
Greg Egan
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2026-08-20 04:00:14 UTC
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wss://relay.ditto.pubPublished at
2026-08-20 04:00:14 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Wow, not only have astronomers found a star that comes so close to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy that a detailed study of its orbit over the next decade should be able to quantify the black hole’s spin, there is a chance that future spectroscopic analysis will show that it was once part of a binary pair with a known hypervelocity star moving away from the galaxy’s centre, providing some evidence for the capture/eject Hills mechanism, explaining how stars end up so close to a black hole in the first place.\n\nhttps://www.science.org/content/article/fastest-known-star-could-reveal-spin-our-galaxy-s-giant-black-hole",
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