Credit: ESO/F. Peißker et al.

D9 is the first star pair ever found near Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. This image shows an emission line of hydrogen mapped by the SINFONI instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The instrument provides a spectrum for every single pixel; over the years, the emission around D9 was found to oscillate periodically towards red and blue wavelengths, which revealed that D9 is actually two stars orbiting each other. D9 is the orange patch near the top right of the image, to the left of a brighter and slightly bigger patch. Sagittarius A* is located almost in the middle of the image.

Provider: European Southern Observatory

Image Source: https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso2418c/

Curator: European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, None, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License