Artist’s animation of S2’s precession effect

Observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed for the first time that a star, S2, orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way moves just as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Most stars and planets have a non-circular orbit and therefore move closer and further away from the object they are rotating around. S2’s orbit precesses, meaning that the location of its closest point to the supermassive black hole changes with each turn, such that th