Elisabete M. de Gouveia Dal Pino

Something massive hides at the center of the Milky Way — four million times heavier than the Sun. The star S2, like a racer on a steep curve, loops around this object every sixteen years in an elongated orbit, accelerating to 7650 kilometers per second. By tracking exactly how it moves, astronomers are trying to figure out what that 'something' is.

A bottomless well, but not quite. An ordinary black hole has a boundary, the event horizon, beyond which nothing returns. But what if you remove that boundary? That's exactly the kind of object, dubbed JMN-1, that astrophysicists modeled: a massive body born from stellar collapse, but without the impenetrable veil.