Unusual Star Statistics around Galaxy-Centre Black Hole
In our local environment, about 70% of stars exist as one of a binary system, and for massive stars the percentage is close to 100%. (Study of binary systems is done by observing the Doppler shift in their combined spectra.)
However, it has just been revealed that near the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the percentage of stars as binary pairs is only about 47%. Moreover, most of the massive stars are singletons!
Even more strange, around half of these stars are very young – less than 6 million years old. They couldn’t have migrated to the black hole vicinity in that short a time-period, so there might be some unknown mechanism facilitating star formation in that relatively hostile environment.
The conjecture is that either the extreme gravitational effects are flinging the lost binary twin out of the vicinity, or causing the binaries to collide and merge into a single star – this would also make the star appear younger which might explain the “very young” anomaly described above.
