Stars & Gas Clouds around Milky Way's Supermassive Central Black Hole | ESO

Stars & Gas Clouds around Milky Way's Supermassive Central Black Hole | ESO

A new view on the heart of our Milky Way galaxy is presented in this picture taken with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). It reveals the stars and gas surrounding an invisible giant—a supermassive black hole, located about 27,000 light-years away. This is a hugely dynamic environment with stars and gas clouds passing by the black hole at high speeds.

A team of astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany has detected a new gas cloud, named G2t, orbiting the supermassive black hole. Two gas clouds, G1 and G2, were already known, but their nature and origin were still being debated. In particular, it was unclear whether these clouds were hiding a star inside or consisted purely of gas. However, the discovery of a third gas cloud now helps answer these questions.

The observations were done with the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) instrument on ESO’s VLT. Thanks to this, astronomers were able to measure the 3D orbits of the clouds around the black hole. The clouds move within a very small region at the center of this wide-field image. It was revealed that G1, G2 and G2t are on almost identical orbits, only rotated a bit with respect to each other. This rules out the possibility that each cloud hides a star in their core, as the odds of stars having almost identical orbits are slim. The similarity of the orbits suggests that the three clouds probably share the same origin, most likely IRS16SW, a pair of massive stars expelling an enormous amount of gas. As IRS16SW moves around the black hole, each cloud of gas is ejected in similar orbits, explaining the close trajectories of the ‘G-triplet’.

This discovery shows that despite decades of monitoring our Milky Way center new unanswered curiosities arise. 

Image Description: This image has a black background with thousands of light sources visible. There are stars closer and farther away present, appearing as simple white dots on the night sky. At image center, closer stars are gathered. These centered stars are embedded in a pinkish haze of gas.

Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/D. Ribeiro for the MPE GC team
Release Date: March 9, 2026

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