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For the first time, astronomers have shown that large stars can form close to a supermassive black hole, such as the one at the centre of the Milky Way.
Big stars about 50 times as massive as the Sun are known to exist around the Milky Way's black hole, but how they came to be there was uncertain.
"How a black hole interacts with its surrounding galaxy is a really big question," says Tod Lauer, an astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, US, who was involved in previous studies of blue stars around a black hole in the Andromeda galaxy.
"The first guess would be that stars can't form around black holes - gas comes in, but then gets either eaten or blown away," he told New Scientist. If stars can in fact form close in, as the new results indicate, then astronomers will have to rethink the physics of the activity in all galaxy nuclei, Lauer says.
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