Benjamin Thompson

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746 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Sep

Benjamin Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

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Nature Podcast · A black hole's spin could finally be measured by a high-speed star · 19 Aug 2026 podcast

While researchers know a lot about this black hole, where it is, how far away it is, its likely mass, and so on, how much its spinning has been hard to pin down.

In fact, whether SAG A star is spinning at all is unknown, but given that everything in the universe spins, planets, stars, galaxies, physicists are pretty confident that it is.

In fact, spin is built into the models of how supermassive black holes work.

Things like the enormous jets of matter they fire out require spin in order to occur.

But gauging precisely what an enormous black hole spin is is tough.

You can't see these objects, and so researchers have had to infer and estimate spin rates for them by other means.

And so working out how much our closest supermassive black hole is spinning should help confirm that black hole models are correct, and explain more about how the wider universe functions.

And this brings us back to the star the researchers are writing about this week, which they call S three oh one.

To find out more about it and how it could help in the search for Saga star's spin, I called up one of the authors, Stefan Gillison, from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

Stefan laid out a bit more about what makes S three hundred one useful in this quest.

So we have this star then with an elliptical orbit, and at one end of the ellipse it's very close to Sagittarius, a star.

How close does this star get to the black hole?

Maybe in units that I can comprehend.

And how might the orbit of this star help researchers figure out the spin of Sagittarius a star?

How do these two things go together?

So if the supermassive black hole is spinning then it will add a nudge to the orbit of the star, and I guess depending on how much it spins, that orbit will be altered to a greater or lesser degree.

And so these are things that the star S three hundred oh one might help you to figure out.

How did you go about identifying that it was indeed a star?

Your first inklings, I believe, were back in twenty twenty three.

I mean, given its faintness and its distance, how confident are you that it is a star?

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