You’ll find lots of visitors in the downtown of any major city. That may also be the case with the “downtown” of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. A recent study found that one of the stars in the galaxy’s core probably was born far outside that region.
The core contains a supermassive black hole that’s more than four million times the mass of the Sun. Swarms of stars encircle the black hole – some of them quite close. But the black hole’s gravity is so powerful it would stir up any star-forming gas and dust around it, preventing the birth of stars. So the stars that are close to the black hole must have been born elsewhere, then migrated in toward the black hole.
One of those stars is cataloged as SO-6. The new study found that it’s no more than two-thirds of a light-year from the black hole, and perhaps a good bit closer.
The star is probably about 10 billion years old – twice as old as the Sun. And it’s nearing the end of its life – it’s gotten bigger and cooler, forming a red giant. That suggests it’s about the same mass as the Sun.
But its chemical composition doesn’t match that of most of the stars in the core. Instead, it’s a closer match for the stars in many of the small galaxies that surround the Milky Way. So SO-6 could have started 50,000 light-years or more from its current location, then migrated into the core – a visitor to “downtown” Milky Way.
Script by Damond Benningfield