On March 2, 2019, astronomers reported discovery of a dozen black holes gathered around Sagittarius A (Sgr A ), the supermassive monster in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, supporting a decades-old prediction. After conducting a cosmic inventory to calculate and categorize stellar-remnant black holes, the astronomers from the University of California concluded that there are probably tens of millions of the enigmatic, dark objects in the Milky Way – far more than expected.
Star S2 orbiting Sagittarius A
Now, observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed for the first time that a star, named S2, orbiting Sgr A (artist impression above) –at the very edge of where space-time breaks down. The star moves in an egg-shaped orbit just as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Its orbit is not like an ellipse as predicted by Newton’s theory of gravity. This long-sought-after result was made possible by increasingly precise measure