Tough Stellar Infants Survive Black Hole Neighborhood LONG
BEACH, California (January 5, 2009) -- The region around a
supermassive black hole is a bad neighborhood for stars. The
black hole’s gravity pulls apart stars that pass too close, and
rips potentially star-forming clouds of gas and dust to shreds
in a process that one researcher describes as
“spaghettification.” Even so, a team of astronomers says it has
found at least two infant stars orbiting close to the
supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
The stars probably were born quite close to the black hole, in
the middle of the bad neighborhood. A team led by Elizabeth
Humphreys of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
studied the environment around the black hole, which is known as
Sagittarius A* (“A Star”), with the Very Large Array, a
collection of 27 radio antennas in New Mexico. Signals from the
antennas are combined to produce images and other observations.
A swirl of stars, gas, and dust surrounds the supermassive