The Shortest-Known–Period Star Orbiting Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole

Creators: Meyer, L.; Ghez, A. M.; Schödel, R.; Yelda, S.; Boehle, A.; Lu, J. R.; Do, T.; Morris, M. R.; Becklin, E. E.; Matthews, K.

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Abstract

Stars with short orbital periods at the center of our Galaxy offer a powerful probe of a supermassive black hole. Over the past 17 years, the W. M. Keck Observatory has been used to image the galactic center at the highest angular resolution possible today. By adding to this data set and advancing methodologies, we have detected S0-102, a star orbiting our Galaxy's supermassive black hole with a period of just 11.5 years. S0-102 doubles the number of known stars with full phase coverage and periods of less than 20 years. It thereby provides the opportunity, with future measurements, to resolve degeneracies in the parameters describing the central gravitational potential and to test Einstein's theory of general relativity in an unexplored regime.

Additional Information

© 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received for publication 1 June 2012; accepted for publication 31 August 2012. We thank the staff of the Keck Observatory for all their help in obtaining the new observations. Support for this work was provided by NSF grant AST 0909218, the Levine-Leichtman Family Foundation, and the W. M. Keck Foundation. R.S. acknowledges support by the Ramòn y Cajal program; by grants AYA2010-17631, AYA2009-13036, and PA1002584 of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; and by grant P08-TIC-4075 of the Junta de Andalucía. The W. M. Keck Observatory is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. The data described in the paper are presented in the supplementary materials.

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