A star so close to the Milky Way’s black hole it feels its spin

We thought this was the closest star to the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, turns out we were wrong! It’s actually this one, S301. It’s 2 billion times fainter than the brightest stars in the night sky, it comes closer to the black hole at the centre than Uranus does to the Sun, travelling at 25,000 km/s - that’s 8% of the speed of light! But it’s not getting torn apart, or sucked in. It’s on a stable orbit. And that is really, really good news for us astrophysicists. Because with th