Scientists just found the fastest known star in the Milky Way. It zooms around our black hole at 15,500 miles per second

Astronomers have found the fastest known star in the Milky Way, a faint object racing around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. Dubbed S301, the star reaches about 15,500 miles (25,000 kilometers) per second at its fastest — more than 8% the speed of light.

"What is special about this star is that it's orbiting Sagittarius A* on a very tight orbit, taking just 8.7 years to complete it, and is approaching the black hole at a mere 12 times the distance of Earth to the sun. That is unprecedented," study author Felix Mang, a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, said in a

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