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Northwestern University’s new research using simulations of 1,000 stars around the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, reveals that high-speed stellar collisions lead to the formation of youthful-looking stars. These stars either become stripped-down and low-mass or merge into massive entities, presenting a rejuvenated appearance despite their ancient origins. Credit: SciTechDaily.
This illustration shows the orbits of stars very close to Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Credit: ESO / L. Calçada / Spaceengine.org “The closest star to our sun is about four light-years away,” Rose explained. “Within that same distance near the supermassive black hole, there are more than a million stars. It’s an incredibly crowded neighborhood. On top of that, the supermassive black hole has a really strong gravitational pull. As they orbit the black hole, stars can move at thousands of kilometers per second.”
“They whack into each other and keep going,” Rose said. “They just graze each other as though they are exchanging a very violent high-five. This causes the stars to eject some material and lose their outer layers. Depending on how fast they are moving and how much they overlap when they collide, they might lose quite a bit of their outer layers. These destructive collisions result in a population of strange, stripped down, low-mass stars.
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