THE neighbourhood around a black hole is no place to raise a star. Violent forces usually rip apart gas clouds, preventing them from condensing into stars. Despite this, astronomers have spotted hints of protostars only 6.5 light years away from the Milky Way鈥檚 centre, where a black hole is thought to reside.
The protostars are shrouded by so much gas they cannot be seen with telescopes. Instead, Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues found strong radio signals emitted by 鈥渕ethanol masers鈥� 鈥� clouds of methanol gas that act like lasers and are a telltale sign of star formation (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, in press).
The team suspect the gas cloud that spawned the protostars was pulled into orbit around the Milky Way鈥檚 centre not long before they formed. Older stars share the same space as these protostars, suggesting the Milky Way may have a history of such captures. Gas clouds may be constantly coming in to form a generation of stars before being used up, says Yusef-Zadeh. This process may also explain a population of stars perched only 2 light years away from the Milky Way鈥檚 centre. How any star can take shape in this violent region remains a mystery.
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