CIERA-affiliated Professor Farhad Yusef-Zadeh has uncovered new evidence of star formation at the center of the Milky Way. In a paper published in April, Yusef-Zadeh and colleagues observed low-mass stars forming near the galactic center, where the Galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole. Yusef-Zadeh and his team used the Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico to spot these forming stars, thanks to the bright disks of dust and gas surrounding them. This research helps disprove the theory that the gravitational force of a black hole is too great for stars to form nearby.
The published paper is available at The Astrophysical Journal Letters, with a video abstract. This discovery has been covered in news stories by Sky & Telescope, Discovery News, and Physics World.