The G2 body was discovered by astronomers in 2011 and was described in a study published the following year. At that time, it was rushing to such a point in its orbit that it would be closest to the black hole.
It’s not a cloud, it’s more of a star
Astronomers logically assumed that the body would rupture at this close encounter and be swallowed by a black hole, which should have led to supermassive accretionary fireworks.
But nothing like that happened. The G2 body stretched as it approached the black hole, and then returned to a more compact shape.
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Its other uniqueness was that it was very hot, much warmer than a normal cloud of space dust. It is possible that Sgr A * or some other stars may have warmed him, but his temperature remained the same no matter where the body was. This indicated that whatever his “heater” was, it was far more in the cloud itself than external influences.
Astronomers eventually concluded that such behavior corresponded to a star rather than a cloud. Therefore, last year, a team of researchers introduced the theory that the G2 cloud hides a secret star, or that it is the result of a collision of two stars, which created a huge cloud of gas and dust around them.
They are not two stars, there are more. And they are young
However, the same study also revealed the discovery of four other similar objects in the center of the galaxy, increasing the total number of G objects to six. And that’s a lot of merged binaries.
A team of researchers, led by astrophysicist Florian Peißker of the University of Cologne in Germany, therefore thoroughly examined 14 years of space sky observations with the Sinfoni device on the ESO / VLT space telescope and came up with an alternative explanation: according to his analysis, they could hide in G2 even three stars about one million years old.
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Such an age is very low for stars; for example, the Sun is 4.6 billion years old. In short, G2 stars are so young that they are still surrounded by material from the cloud in which they formed.
“The fact that G2 actually consists of three evolving young stars is a complete sensation,” says Peißker. “This discovery makes these three stars the youngest stars ever observed around SgrA *,” he added.
Young stellar population
At the center of the galaxy is a special population of young stars, known as the S star cluster. According to Peißker’s team model, the G2 stars could also belong to it. They could all “be born in the same stellar nursery” and form a star cluster, which later dissolved, the individual stars tore away from it and formed new orbits around Sgr A *.
Even if they were not associated with the S cluster, the G2 stars were probably part of a larger cluster of stars at some point. Its other components could be other dusty objects orbiting Sgr A *, which would be disturbed by gravity at a greater distance when moving towards the supermassive black hole.
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Because the environment around Sgr A * is not considered favorable by astronomers for star formation, it will be necessary to further investigate where G2 and other G objects may have come from. However, new knowledge can be used to learn more about black holes.
“The new results provide a unique insight into how black holes work,” says Peißker. “On the SgrA * environment, we can study how galaxies evolved in completely different corners of our universe.”
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