Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2025

44 MARCH-APRIL 2025 ASTRO PUBLISHING tory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), helps us understand how stars survive in environments with ex- treme gravity, and could pave the way for the detection of planets close to Sagittarius A*. “Black holes are not as destructive as we thought,” says Florian Peißker, a researcher at the University of Cologne, Germany, and lead author of the study published in Nature Communications . Binary stars, pairs of stars orbiting each other, are very common in the Universe, but they had never before been found near a supermassive black hole, where the intense gravity can make stellar sys- tems unstable. This new discovery shows that some binaries can briefly thrive, even un- First ever binary star found near Sagittarius A* A n international team of re- searchers has detected a bi- nary star orbiting close to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. It is the first time a stellar pair has been found in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole. The dis- covery, based on data collected by the European Southern Observa- by ESO Bárbara Ferreira