At the center of the Milky Way rests Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole weighing over 4.6 million times our Sun. Around it, there are stars and gas. Now, astronomers from UCLA and the W. M. Keck Observatory have found something else: curious objects that form a class of their own.



The first object of this new “G” class was discovered in 2005. A second one, G2, was found in 2012. Now four more have been announced in a new Nature study. The objects are believed to be the end product of a merger between two stars. The resulting large star has a thick envelope of gas, and whenever it gets closer to the black hole, it gets stretched out like an interstellar gas cloud.



“These objects look like gas but behave like stars,” co-author Professor Andrea Ghez, director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group, said in a statement.



“At the time of closest approach, G2 had a really strange signature,” Ghez said. “We had seen it before, but it didn’t look too peculiar until it got close to the black…