THE neighbourhood around a black hole is no place to raise a star. Violent forces usually rip apart gas clouds, preventing them from condensing into stars. Despite this, astronomers have spotted hints of protostars only 6.5 light years away from the Milky Way’s centre, where a black hole is thought to reside.
The protostars are shrouded by so much gas they cannot be seen with telescopes. Instead, Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues found strong radio signals emitted by “methanol masers” – clouds of methanol gas that act like lasers and are a telltale sign of…
