{"id":242834,"date":"2026-08-18T01:27:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T06:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/a-star-near-the-milky-ways-black-hole-is-losing-mass-at-an-astonishing-rate"},"modified":"2026-08-18T01:27:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T06:27:00","slug":"a-star-near-the-milky-ways-black-hole-is-losing-mass-at-an-astonishing-rate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/a-star-near-the-milky-ways-black-hole-is-losing-mass-at-an-astonishing-rate","title":{"rendered":"A Star Near the Milky Way\u2019s Black Hole Is Losing Mass at an Astonishing Rate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-star-near-the-milky-ways-black-hole-is-losing-mass-at-an-astonishing-rate2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope show that IRS 3, a star near the center of the Milky Way, is losing vast amounts of mass, causing its surrounding envelope to expand continuously.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, a mature star is shedding enormous amounts of gas and dust into space. Observations of IRS 3 suggest that this material has created an exceptionally large envelope, and within it astronomers have detected water molecules despite the extreme environment surrounding the galactic center.<\/p>\n<p>The research was led by PD Dr. Florian Pei\u00dfker of the <a href=\"https:\/\/scitechdaily.com\/tag\/university-of-cologne\/\">University of Cologne\u2019s Institute for Astrophysics<\/a>. Pei\u00dfker\u2019s group, which participates in the European James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) consortium studying nearby galaxies, investigates the region surrounding Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope show that IRS 3, a star near the center of the Milky Way, is losing vast amounts of mass, causing its surrounding envelope to expand continuously. Near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, a mature star is shedding enormous amounts of gas [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242834","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242834\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}