The NACO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope was used to create this time-lapse video of stars orbiting the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole over the course of nearly 20 years. — Star Zooms Past Monster Black Hole, Confirms Relativity. For the first time ever, researchers have watched a star race past the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, verifying that its motion showed the effects of general relativity, as predicted by Albert Einstein.The stars of the Milky Way orbit a gargantuan black hole called Sagittarius A*, which is generally quiet as viewed from Earth, except for ripping apart the occasional object that ventures too close. The black hole’s mass is 4 million times that of the sun, and it exhibits our galaxy’s strongest gravitational field, making it — and a small group of stars orbiting it at high speed — a perfect proving ground for the extreme effects predicted by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. For 26 years, researchers have been observing the center of the Milky Way using instruments from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). “The galactic center was our laboratory to test gravity,” Odele Straub, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory and co-author of the new study, said at an ESO news conference July 26.
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