Unraveling the Mystery of the Missing Stars in the Milky Way's Center.

Observations by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii have shown that stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy are mysteriously missing their binary companions. A team led by Devin Chu of the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed 10 years' worth of observations tracking 28 stars orbiting our galaxy's central supermassive black hole, which is known as Sagittarius A* and has a mass 4.1 million times that of the sun. None of the S-stars are binaries, confounding expectations that massive stars usually form in binary or even triplet systems.