Still searching for the truth @sora-illusion - Tumblr Blog

i’m giving up personhood to become a full-time abstract concept

"and the universe said i love you."

everyone on replies is terrified of this fact but i just think it's so sweet and heartwarming. she's holding our hand and leading us somewhere secret and we're both giggling like kids. i love her

solowinged

let’s travel through the vast unknown with mama

omnybus

Space chickens

happyheidi

a little bunny looking at the stars in case you're having a bad day.

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★ ☄︎

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༘ * 🔭🐇

kaijuno

There’s a star near the center of our galaxy that’s moving so fast… it’s literally bending time.

Meet S62 the fastest known star in the universe. Nestled deep in the heart of the Milky Way, this stellar speedster whips around Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, at an incredible 24,000 kilometers per second that’s about 53 million mph, or 8% the speed of light.

That’s not just fast it’s relativistic. At that velocity, time slows down for S62. An hour near the black hole for this star would equal about 100 minutes on Earth, thanks to the intense effects of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

S62 completes one orbit every 9.9 years, but it doesn’t move in a neat ellipse. Its path precesses, or shifts, by around 10 degrees each orbit, drawing out a kind of cosmic spirograph far beyond what Newtonian physics can explain. It’s like watching Mercury’s famous orbital wobble, but amped up to interstellar extremes.

This phenomenon isn't just mind-blowing it’s scientific gold. Before S62, its sibling S2 held the record, helping confirm gravitational redshift during its close brush with Sagittarius A* in 2018. But S62 is faster, tighter, and even more extreme, offering an unmatched laboratory to test the limits of gravity, time, and space.

So while this star may be nearly 26,000 light-years away, it’s giving us front-row physics in real time proving that the universe still holds mysteries that only Einstein could predict.

Research from Florian Peißker et al., “S62 on a 9.9 yr Orbit around SgrA*,”* published in The Astrophysical Journal (2020). Observations via the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.