A team of astronomers has just detected the fastest star in the galaxy. Its anomalous speed has a more unsettling explanation: It orbits Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, the mass of which is equivalent to four million times that of the sun. S301, as astronomers have named
When Soundgarden Wrote “Black Hole Sun,” they may have inadvertently been onto something. In a new paper in Nature, scientists have chronicled a “black hole star” that’s the size of our solar system and glows bright red in the depth of space. The findings are based on observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, which
Observations and data reduction MoM-BH*-1 has been observed with JWST by three programmes. It was imaged in cycle 1 by the PRIMER survey14 (JWST-GO-1837; principal investigator: J. Dunlop) using the MIRI (5 January 2023 and 16 January 2023) and NIRCam (7 August 2023 and 9 August 2023) instruments. In cycle 2 (19 December 2023), the
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