Astronomers find water in the harsh environment near the Milky Way's black hole — Space photo of the week
A view of the Milky Way galaxy. (Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, F.
Peißker, J.
Lu, F.
Yusef-Zadeh, N.
B.
Sabha, C.
Chan) Quick facts What it is: The region around the star IRS 3 Where it is: 26,000 light-years from Earth When it was shared: Aug.
11, 2026 This mesmerizing image may look pretty, but it captures a hostile environment: the turbulent region surrounding a dying star close to our galaxy's central black hole.
This unprecedented view of the star IRS 3 (located near the center of the image) shows that it is shedding an enormous amount of material, gas and dust to build a sprawling envelope around itself.
Within that star's envelope, scientists detected traces of water.
Although astronomers have detected water near other stars before, this is the first time it's been found this close to the Milky Way's supermassive black hole , known as Sagittarius A*.
The observations, described Aug.
11 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics , show that even in the harsh conditions surrounding a galaxy's central region, aging stars like IRS 3 may still be quietly seeding their surroundings with dust.
That challenges the assumption that galactic centers are too extreme for this process to happen at all.
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