Fastest Star Discovered Orbiting Milky Way's Central Black Hole

Astronomers have discovered the fastest star ever recorded orbiting the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, a breakthrough that offers an unprecedented opportunity to test fundamental physics. The star, named S301, was identified by the GRAVITY collaboration using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer in Chile. Research describing the find was published in the journal Nature on August 19, 2026.

S301 completes a tight orbit around the black hole, Sagittarius A, every 8.7 years, traveling at speeds reaching approximately 56 million miles per hour, or 8 percent of the speed of light. This makes it both the fastest and the closest star yet observed to approach the galactic center, coming within a distance comparable to that between Saturn and our Sun. The star's close pass allows scientists to study effects predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity that are otherwise too subtle to detect.

"What is special about this star is that it's orbiting Sagittarius A on a very tight orbit," said Felix Mang, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and an author of the study. "Because it comes so close, it...