For decades, astronomers have had their earthly eyes on the adventures of a star known as S2 that tickles the edges of oblivion.

Every 16 years, the star’s orbit takes it within a cosmic whisker’s breadth — 11 billion miles — of the lip of what is believed to be the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, the pothole in eternity at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. That black hole has consumed mass equivalent to four million suns. During its fraught passages, the S2 star experiences the full strangeness of the universe, according to Einstein.

One result of this strangeness, now determined after 27 years of high-precision observations with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile is that the star’s egg-shaped orbit does not stay fixed in space. Reinhard Genzel, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and his colleagues described the star’s unusual journey around the black hole on Thursday in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

As shown in the animated video above, the orbit itself rotates around the black hole. The star’s closest point to the black hole, known as perihelion, advances around in a circle by about a fifth of a degree — 12 arc minutes. At this rate the orbit will do a complete loop in only 28,800 years, a mere cosmic eyeblink.