Scientists have discovered strange objects orbiting our galaxy’s black hole

It went from being a pretty innocuous object when it was far from the black hole to one that was really stretched out and distorted at its closest approach and lost its outer shell, and now it’s getting more compact again,” said Andrea Ghez, professor of astrophysics at UCLA and director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group. Ghez believes these G objects were once pairs of binary stars which merged into single objects due to the extreme gravitational forces near the supermassive black hole.

Gas within the G2 object was significantly stretched by gravity from Sgr A*, while dust within the body did not expand toward the black hole to nearly the same degree. “One of the things that has gotten everyone excited about the G objects is that the stuff that gets pulled off of them by tidal forces as they sweep by the central black hole must inevitably fall into the black hole.

Timeline of Gas