This is the first time such a close grouping has been seen so soon after the Big Bang and the finding helps us better understand how supermassive black holes, one of which exists at the center of our Milky Way, formed and grew to their enormous sizes so quickly. It supports the theory that black holes can grow rapidly within large, web-like structures which contain plenty of gas to fuel them.

“This research was mainly driven by the desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objects—supermassive black holes in the early Universe. These are extreme systems and to date we have had no good explanation for their existence,” said Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the new research published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The new observations with ESO’s VLT revealed several galaxies surrounding a supermassive black hole, all lying in a cosmic “spider’s web” of gas extending to over 300 times the size of the Milky Way. “The cosmic web filaments are like spider’s web threads,” explains Mignoli. “The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and streams of gas—available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole—can flow along the filaments.”

The light from this large web-like structure, with its black hole of one billion solar masses, has travelled to us from a time when the Universe was only 0.9 billion years old. “Our work has placed an important piece in the largely incomplete puzzle that is the formation and growth of such extreme, yet relatively abundant, objects so quickly after the Big Bang,” says co-author Roberto Gilli, also an astronomer at INAF in Bologna, referring to supermassive black holes.

The very first black holes, thought to have formed from the collapse of the first stars, must have grown very fast to reach masses of a billion suns within the first 0.9 billion years of the Universe’s life. But astronomers have struggled to explain how sufficiently large amounts of “black hole fuel” could have been available to enable these objects to grow to such enormous sizes in such a short time. The new-found structure offers a likely explanation: the “spider’s web” and the galaxies within it contain enough gas to provide the fuel that the central black hole needs to quickly become a supermassive giant.

But how did such large web-like structures form in the first place? Astronomers think giant halos of mysterious dark matter are key. These large regions of invisible matter are thought to attract huge amounts of gas in the early Universe; together, the gas and the invisible dark matter form the web-like structures where galaxies and black holes can evolve.

“Our finding lends support to the idea that the most distant and massive black holes form and grow within massive dark matter halos in large-scale structures, and that the absence of earlier detections of such structures was likely due to observational limitations,” says Colin Norman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, also a co-author on the study.

The galaxies now detected are some of the faintest that current telescopes can observe. This discovery required observations over several hours using the largest optical telescopes available, including ESO’s VLT. Using the MUSE and FORS2 instruments on the VLT at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert, the team confirmed the link between four of the six galaxies and the black hole. “We believe we have just seen the tip of the iceberg, and that the few galaxies discovered so far around this supermassive black hole are only the brightest ones,” said co-author Barbara Balmaverde, an astronomer at INAF in Torino, Italy.

These results contribute to our understanding of how supermassive black holes and large cosmic structures formed and evolved. ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in Chile, will be able to build on this research by observing many more fainter galaxies around massive black holes in the early Universe using its powerful instruments.

At the center of our galaxy is Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), a humongous black hole about four million times the mass of our sun. Being so big, its gravitational effects are extreme and they can be detected by looking at the stars in its immediate vicinity, Cnet reported.

Orbiting Sgr A* is a handful of stars (and some mysterious objects), locked in a cosmic two-step with the invisible monster, moving at mind-melting speeds.

And astronomers have just discovered the quickest of the lot, clocking its fastest speed around Sgr A* at 8% the speed of light.

A study, published in The Astrophysics Journal on Tuesday, examined the area surrounding Sgr A*, looking for the signature signs of stars. Previous research has discovered dozens of stars moving around the supermassive black hole on highly unusual orbits. This population of stars is known collectively as the S-stars and some of them orbit incredibly close to the black hole, making them difficult to detect.

But the research team, using instruments installed at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, scoured through images taken between 2004 and 2016, adding five new stars, S4711-S4715, to the population and tracking their movements around Sgr A*. Their results show more evidence that a distinct population of stars orbit Sgr A* at distances comparable to the size of our solar system.

And being so close to the terrifying, bottomless abyss at the center of the Milky Way, they are privy to some extreme physics.

Florian Peissker, an astronomer at the University of Cologne in Germany, and his team have been studying the region of space close to the black hole intensely. In January, they reported observations of the star S62. Their observations, published in the Astrophysics Journal, revealed S62 was orbiting the black hole once every 9.9 years, giving it the shortest orbital period and making it the fastest star to blitz around the Milky Way’s black hole.

But Peissker and colleagues’ new data has seen S62 drop both of its records.

According to The Astronomer’s Telegram, one of the newly-discovered stars, S4711, orbits the Milky Way’s black hole once every 7.6 years, claiming the record for the shortest orbital period.

Another star, S4714, is even more extreme. It doesn’t quite get as close to Sgr A* as S4711 but it’s traveling around the black hole at 8% the speed of light. At that speed, the star is moving about 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers) every second, which would mean it could make one full lap of the Earth in just over 1.5 seconds.

The highly-eccentric orbits of the S-stars aren’t just cosmic curiosities either; the stars help to establish further evidence for Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The theory predicts how space, time and gravity interact and suggests huge, dense objects like black holes can warp space around them. Studying the S-stars, astronomers can see some of the motion predicted by Einstein’s theory. A team from the Max Planck Institute recently did so, when they studied the star S2 earlier this year and found it adhered strictly to Einstein’s theory.

The team believes improved data analysis could yield even further insight into the space around Sgr A* and they expect more stars on extremely tight orbits to be discovered in “the near future.” The Extremely Large Telescope, which is expected to become operational in 2025, will gather 13 times more light than any optical telescope operational today and should help locate a few more. Until then, S4714 gets to wear the crown.