Astronomers have yet again proved Einstein right, this time using observations that reveal the strange orbit of a black hole-circling star.

They assed data from nearly 30 years of observations.

Scientists have observed the same type of movement, called Schwarzchild precession, in the orbit of Mercury (to a lesser extent) due to the sun's gravitational pull.

In 1915, Albert Einstein predicted the gravitational pull of a black hole would be strong enough to influence the orbits of the objects circling them.

Now, more than a century later, several international scientists with the GRAVITY collaboration have mapped the movement of a star that proves Einstein's theory. The star is called S2, and at a rate of about once every 16 years, it orbits the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, called Sagittarius A*. The black hole lies about 26,000 light-years away from the sun.

“Normally, if you put a star in orbit, it moves along an ellipse and the orbit closes,” astronomer Frank Eisenhauer, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, told New Scientist. “But when the gravity is very strong, the ellipse moves from orbit to orbit and makes a rosette shape.”

Astronomers have been using telescopes like European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to monitor S2 for 27 years, and the GRAVITY team used that data to precisely chart the star's rosette-shaped path. The researchers published their work April 16 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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This type of movement, which is caused by the warping of spacetime, is known as Schwarzchild precession. Mercury also shares the same unique orbit, but it's less pronounced because the sun's gravitational influence isn't as strong as a black hole's. (The mass of Sagittarius A* is about 4 million times the mass of the sun.)

Einstein suggested his new theory could be used to explain the Mercury's odd orbit. All these years later, it turns out he was right. Again.

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