20 Year time-lapse video of stars orbiting a supermassive black hole
A 20-year time-lapse video shows stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*. The footage reveals the stars' orbital paths, providing direct evidence of the black hole's immense gravitational influence.
Background
- This is a 20-year timelapse (2003–2023) from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) showing stars orbiting Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, about 26,000 light-years from Earth.
- By tracking these stellar orbits over decades, astronomers proved that an invisible object with 4 million times the Sun's mass must be a black hole — work that won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics (Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez).
- One star, S2, completes an orbit in about 16 years; in 2018 its closest approach tested Einstein's general relativity in a strong gravitational field and confirmed a predicted effect called gravitational redshift.
- The imagery uses adaptive optics on ESO's Very Large Telescope (Chile) to cancel atmospheric blurring, achieving the resolution needed to see individual stars in the dense galactic center.