Young stars live too close to our galaxy's black hole

Abstract

A swarm of baby stars live just a fraction of a light year from the galaxy's central supermassive black hole. But no one can explain how they ended up so close in their short lifetimes. Maryam Habibi at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching Germany and her colleagues took a closer look at the stars. The team found that the stars have masses between 8 and 14 times that of the sun, have bulk temperatures ranging from 20,700 to 28,200°C--more than three times as hot as the sun--and rotate at 60 to 170 kilometers per second at the equator. The stars are also far younger than the sun. By comparing their observations with models of star evolution, the researchers found that the stars are less than 15 million years old.