Stephan A. Meighen-Berger

Imagine an ocean. Invisible, almost intangible, yet hundreds of millions of times denser right at the mouth of a giant whirlpool. This is the fate of star S4714 — a fearless diver whose orbit sweeps past the event horizon of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.

At the center of the Milky Way, where the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* reigns supreme (its metric first derived by Karl Schwarzschild), star S4714 makes a dizzying voyage.

A billiard ball clicks against another in complete darkness. The sound of the impact and the clatter of balls dropping into pockets: that's all you hear. This is roughly how physicists study the interactions of elementary particles at energies that no terrestrial accelerator can reproduce.