**Astronomy Picture of the Day**
21 August 2026
**Time-Lapse of the Star S301 Orbiting the Black Hole in the Center of the Galaxy**
Video:
Credit: Not provided
What does it feel like to zoom around a spinning supermassive black hole ? The featured video is an animation showing a time-lapse of 4 years of observations of the star S301 orbiting Sagittarius A* , the 4-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of our Galaxy. S301 was discovered in 2023 with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory , located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Astronomers recently found that S301 takes approximately 8.7 years to go around the black hole and reaches speeds of 25,000 km/s. It comes closer to the black hole than any other stars detected before, at a distance similar to that from Saturn to the Sun . Because it comes so close to Sagittarius A*, S301 could be used to directly measure how fast the black hole spins and test Einstein 's theory of general relativity . According to the theory, a spinning black hole drags the fabric of spacetime around itself, affecting the orbits of close-by objects.
#APOD #Astronomy #Astrophoto #Cosmos #Astrophotography
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260821.html
APOD
npub1ap…f5l75
2026-08-21 04:08:24 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1ap0dw55xedm5w4mkcyq8m7xyluwfc680lywrvfe50vr9ckl5m3uqtf5l75Published at
2026-08-21 04:08:24 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "**Astronomy Picture of the Day**\n\n21 August 2026\n\n**Time-Lapse of the Star S301 Orbiting the Black Hole in the Center of the Galaxy**\n\nVideo: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2608/eso2612b.mp4\n\nCredit: Not provided\n\nWhat does it feel like to zoom around a spinning supermassive black hole ? The featured video is an animation showing a time-lapse of 4 years of observations of the star S301 orbiting Sagittarius A* , the 4-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of our Galaxy. S301 was discovered in 2023 with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory , located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Astronomers recently found that S301 takes approximately 8.7 years to go around the black hole and reaches speeds of 25,000 km/s. It comes closer to the black hole than any other stars detected before, at a distance similar to that from Saturn to the Sun . Because it comes so close to Sagittarius A*, S301 could be used to directly measure how fast the black hole spins and test Einstein 's theory of general relativity . According to the theory, a spinning black hole drags the fabric of spacetime around itself, affecting the orbits of close-by objects.\n\n#APOD #Astronomy #Astrophoto #Cosmos #Astrophotography\n\nhttps://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260821.html\n",
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