S62 is a
star
A star is a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by Self-gravitation, self-gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night sk ...
in
the cluster surrounding
Sagittarius A*
Sagittarius A*, abbreviated as Sgr A* ( ), is the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. Viewed from Earth, it is located near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, about 5.6° south o ...
(Sgr A*), the
supermassive black hole
A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH) is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (). Black holes are a class of astronomical ...
in the
center of the Milky Way. S62 was initially thought to orbit extremely close to Sgr A*, with a period of 9.9 years and a closest approach of only , less than the distance between Uranus and the Sun. This would have put it at just 215 times the
Schwarzschild radius
The Schwarzschild radius is a parameter in the Schwarzschild solution to Einstein's field equations that corresponds to the radius of a sphere in flat space that has the same surface area as that of the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black ho ...
of Sgr A* (the Schwarzschild radius of Sgr A* is approximately 0.082 AU, or 12 million km).
However, later observations with the
GRAVITY instrument of the Very Large Telescope observed S62 to be in an inconsistent position compared to the prediction from the original observations. The star was observed to be moving linearly, with no detected acceleration, indicating that it was not as close to the black hole as it appeared in the projection. The original, mistaken orbital reconstruction is consistent with an observation of the star S29 having been mistaken for S62.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:S62 (star)
Sagittarius (constellation)
Galactic Center