14 DAY TRIAL // There's a lot that we don't know about black holes. But we do know that they're big, not necessarily big as in large, but big as in heavy. So heavy that everything about them is off the scale. Including, it turns out, how fast things around them move.
Astronomers have discovered a black hole and star binary system, dubbed MAXI J1659-152, which broke all previous speed records.
The star, a red dwarf, spins around the common center of mass at a dizzying two million kilometers per hour (1.2 million mph), the fastest star ever seen in an X-ray binary system.
It takes only 2.4 hours for one complete orbit around the center of mass, even though it's one million kilometers (620,000 miles) away from the black hole. All the while, the black hole is siphoning material from the red dwarf.
The star is smaller than the sun, it weighs about one fifth of it. The black hole weighs at least three times more than our sun. Because of that, it only travels at 150,000 km/h (93,000 mph).