image: This is an animation of the stellar orbits in the heart of our galaxy. Images taken from the years 1995 through 2012 are used to track stars orbiting the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. While several stars can be seen in their motion through this region, only two stars -- the brighter star S0-2 and the newly discovered S0-102 -- have been traced through a complete orbit. They are the most tightly bound to the black hole and therefore comprise the most information about it. S0-2, which has an orbital period of 16 years, proved the existence of a black hole. The addition of S0-102, with a period of 11.5 years, will for the first time allow us to test the warping of space and time this close to a black hole. This animation relates to a paper that appeared in the Oct. 5, 2012, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Leo Meyer at University of California, Los Angeles in Los Angeles, Calif., and colleagues was titled, "The Shortest-Known-Period Star Orbiting Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole." view more
Credit: Animation created by professor Andrea Ghez and her research team at UCLA; from data sets obtained with the W. M. Keck Telescopes