Posted on 08/21/2026 12:43:24 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: What does it feel like to zoom around a spinning supermassive black hole? The featured video is an animation showing a time-lapse of 4 years of observations of the star S301 orbiting Sagittarius A*, the 4-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of our Galaxy. S301 was discovered in 2023 with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory, located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Astronomers recently found that S301 takes approximately 8.7 years to go around the black hole and reaches speeds of 25,000 km/s. It comes closer to the black hole than any other stars detected before, at a distance similar to that from Saturn to the Sun. Because it comes so close to Sagittarius A*, S301 could be used to directly measure how fast the black hole spins and test Einstein's theory of general relativity. According to the theory, a spinning black hole drags the fabric of spacetime around itself, affecting the orbits of close-by objects.
Today's image is a short video clip at the source link.
🪐 🌟 🌌 🍔
Today's image is a short video clip at the source link.
At the end you can see the evidence of the precession of its orbit due to relativistic effects from Sag A*.
It looks like it isn’t going to repeat the same orbit.
Is the black hole moving or oscillating back and forth?
See Post #3 above. Miss Regt has it right. Planet Mercury has the same "problem" orbiting the sun. Its orbit doesn't fit Newtonian Physics because it moves fast enough around the sun that you need Einstein's Relativity to compute its orbit correctly. Same with this star orbiting Sgr A.
The black hole is likely spinning.
Nice video.
Orbital mechanics is fascinating.
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