Location of binary star D9 in the Milky Way

This image indicates the location of the newly discovered binary star D9, which is orbiting Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. It is the first star pair ever found near a supermassive black hole. The cut-out shows  the binary system as detected by the SINFONI spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. While the two stars cannot be discerned separately in this image, the binary nature of D9 was revealed by the spectra captured by SINFONI over several years. These spectra showed that the light emitted by hydrogen gas around D9 oscillates periodically towards red and blue wavelengths as the two stars orbit each other.