An extragalactic star at the center of the Milky Way

The center of our Mich Street system may have visitors from far reaches of space: some of the stars orbiting the central black hole did not form on our global island. A team led by Shogo Nishiyama of Miyagi University of Education came to this conclusion after observing the star SO-6, which orbits the supermassive black hole at a distance of only 0.04 light-years. As the working group now reports in the professional journal “Proceedings of the Japan Academy.”The chemical composition does not match that of the Milky Way system, but rather matches that of dwarf galaxies such as the Small Magellanic Cloud. This means that SO-6 has traveled at least 50,000 light-years during its existence – and perhaps much further.