The center of our Galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole of 4 million times the mass of the Sun. A great number of stars spin around it at very high speed. The UCLA Galactic Center Group discovered another class of objects orbiting the black hole: the G objects. These peculiar objects look like gas clouds but behave like stars. G objects are likely stars that are hidden in a thick envelope of gas and dust. They may have formed as the result of the merger of a pair of stars. This animation is a visualization of the orbital motion of G objects and stars in the Galactic Center. The G objects are shown in magenta, young stars in green and old stars in orange. The orbits are based on the Keck data obtained between 1995 and 2019. The research is published in the journal Nature: A blogpost by lead author Anna Ciurlo, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher, is published here: UCLA press release here:
To find out more about the Galactic Center:
Animation done by: Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois
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