The team found the stars by looking at archival data from the Very Large Telescope and Keck telescope. The binary system – which is two stars held together by gravity and dancing around a common point – is called D9 , and is relatively young at only 2.7 million years old.
Sagittarius A – the formal name for the centre of our galaxy – is orbited by high-velocity stars and dusty objects, which are known collectively as the S-cluster.
Florian Peißker Pess-ker from the University of Cologne’s Institute of Astrophysics and colleagues studied the archival data and found D9 within that cluster. It’s relatively youthful age indicates that they likely formed outside of the S-cluster.
Further analysis suggests that this system is reaching the end of its stable window within the S-cluster and that the two parts of the binary system could merge in the relatively near future, due to the influence of the black hole. The detection of D9 suggests that these binary systems are capable of residing within the S-cluster for approximately 1 million years, following migration from outside. These findings provide new insights into one potential evolutionary path of stars in the orbit of Sagittarius A.
