{"id":102266,"date":"2020-02-12T19:09:53","date_gmt":"2020-02-13T03:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/astronomers-find-a-star-dive-bombing-our-galaxys-supermassive-black-hole"},"modified":"2020-02-12T19:09:53","modified_gmt":"2020-02-13T03:09:53","slug":"astronomers-find-a-star-dive-bombing-our-galaxys-supermassive-black-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/astronomers-find-a-star-dive-bombing-our-galaxys-supermassive-black-hole","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers find a star dive-bombing our galaxy\u2019s supermassive black hole"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/astronomers-find-a-star-dive-bombing-our-galaxys-supermassive-black-hole2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>At the center of our galaxy lies Sgr A \u2014 a supermassive black hole. With over 4 million times the Sun\u2019s mass, you can see why it gets that moniker.<\/p>\n<p>One reason we know its mass is that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aanda.org\/articles\/aa\/pdf\/2012\/09\/aa19203-12.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">there\u2019s a cluster of young, luminous stars<\/a> orbiting around it. <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/1611.09144.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">These are called <em>S stars<\/em><\/a>, and they form a group around the black hole about a quarter of a light year across \u2014 a few trillion kilometers. One of these stars, S2, has an elliptical orbit <a href=\"https:\/\/www.syfy.com\/syfywire\/a-stars-plunge-toward-a-huge-black-hole-shows-again-that-einstein-was-pretty-smart\" target=\"_blank\">that takes it to a distance of just 16 billion kilometers<\/a> from the black hole as it travels on its elliptical orbit. Until recently, that star had the closest encounter we knew of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the center of our galaxy lies Sgr A \u2014 a supermassive black hole. With over 4 million times the Sun\u2019s mass, you can see why it gets that moniker. One reason we know its mass is that there\u2019s a cluster of young, luminous stars orbiting around it. These are called S stars, and they [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}