SoylentNews

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Caught in the iron grip of the galaxy’s most powerful gravitational field, a star known as S2 passed within a scant 20 billion kilometres (12.4 billion miles) of the supermassive black hole lurking at the heart of the Milky Way this past May, streaking by at an astonishing 3 percent the speed of light, or more than 25 million kilometres per hour (15 million mph).

Numbers were in close agreement with predictions made using Einstein’s theory of general relativity, [astronomynow.com] revealing a phenomenon known as gravitational redshift in which light from S2 is stretched to longer wavelengths in the gravitational field of the black hole.

Original Submission