Washington, October 5 (ANI): UCLA astronomers have discovered a remarkable star that orbits the enormous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy in a blistering 11-and-a-half years - the shortest known orbit of any star near this black hole.
The star, known as S0-102, may help astronomers discover whether Albert Einstein was right in his fundamental prediction of how black holes warp space and time, said research co-author Andrea Ghez, leader of the discovery team and a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy who holds the Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Chair in Astrophysics.
Before this discovery, astronomers knew of only one star with a very short orbit near the black hole: S0-2, which Ghez used to call her "favorite star" and whose orbit is 16 years. (The "S" is for Sagittarius, the constellation containing the galactic center and the black hole).
"I'm extremely pleased to find two stars that orbit our galaxy's supermassive black hole in much less than a human lifetime," said Ghez, who studies 3,000 stars that orbit the black hole, and has been studying S0-2 since 1995.
Most of the stars have orbits of 60 years or longer, she said.
"It is the tango of S0-102 and S0-2 that will reveal the true geometry of space and time near a black hole for the first time. This measurement cannot be done with one star alone," Ghez said.
Black holes, which form out of the collapse of matter, have such high density that nothing can escape their gravitational pull, not even light. They cannot be seen directly, but their influence on nearby stars is visible and provides a signature, said Ghez, a 2008 MacArthur Fellow.
Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that mass distorts space and time and therefore not only slows down the flow of time but also stretches or shrinks distances.
"Today, Einstein is in every iPhone, because the GPS system would not work without his theory," said Leo Meyer, a researcher in Ghez's team and lead author of the study.
"What we want to find out is, would your phone also work so close to a black hole? The newly discovered star puts us in a position to answer that question in the future," Meyer added.
In the same way that planets orbit around the sun, S0-102 and S0-2 are each in an elliptical orbit around the galaxy's central black hole. The planetary motion in our solar system was the ultimate test for Newton's gravitational theory 300 years ago; the motion of S0-102 and S0-2, Ghez said, will be the ultimate test for Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as a consequence of the curvature of space and time.
Co-authors on the research include Mark Morris, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, and Eric Becklin, UCLA professor emeritus of physics and astronomy.
The research has been published in the journal Science. (ANI)