Come One, Come All!

"Never use threat, force or pressure to make someone have sex."

"Women can ... choose who they marry."

"If you have sex with someone without their consent, this is called rape"

"Rape is a serious crime in the U.K. You could go to prison, lose your support and accommodation, and it will affect your asylum claim."

New U.K. orientation manual for migrants 

 

"All permanent residents and protected persons are eligible for IRCC-funded settlement services [to] help them integrate and build a successful life in Canada as quickly as possible and include information on rights and freedoms of individuals according to Canadian law, understanding of Canadian values, as well as their responsibilities and obligations."

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada spokesperson

600 Gaza refugees enter Canada in 2005  CBC News

 

The United Kingdom, overwhelmed by the presence of migrants, faces a long string of social/cultural problems related to different customs and values being transplanted alongside the migrants into Britain. An epidemic of violence has erupted for several years unlike what the United Kingdom has previously experienced, a stream of non-stop incidents that fall far outside the normal social contract of the Emerald Isle's traditional population. Rapes by migrants perpetrated against vulnerable men, women, teens, even children, taking place in wooded areas, parks, beach change-rooms and rental units.

 

Grooming Gangs in the U.K. Machiavelli Foundation

 

It took long enough for the British Government to pay attention to the scandals that for years had stalked communities where Muslim men, mostly of Pakistani origins, whose sex culture was responsible for grooming gangs focused on raping and using young Caucasian girls as sex slaves, renting out their services for fun and profit. It wasn't that the situation was unknown to British authorities, but that it was quite simply too inconvenient for them to 'notice' much less act on the practise, given the large Muslim population and accusations of 'Islamophobic' racism to be avoided at all costs.

 

Canada too, as it happens, finds itself in inconvenient waters with the surge of the past decade of immigrants, refugees and migrants infiltrating Canadian society. And in Canada not-too-subtle incidents of migrants in the country bringing with them customs contradictory to Western human rights values where incestuous relations, stranger-rape, organized crime, underage marriages, polygamy, genital mutilation offend Canadian customs and laws.

 

In 2015, during the federal election Prime Minister Stephen Harper's election campaign was rife with outrage from civil rights groups and the growing Muslim community in Canada over his government's release of 'instructions for immigrants' booklet Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship that advised foreigners entering Canada as landed immigrants and permanent residents on their way to achieving citizenship, that Canada's welcome did not include 'barbaric cultural practices' such as spousal abuse, 'honour killings', female genital mutilation, and forced polygamy.

 

Burqa ban in Great Britain?  Independent

 

How times have changed; the instructions of yesteryear rejected by the electorate have, by necessity since then been rejuvenated where marriage fraud warning is circulated by government auspices. In Canada too there are those requiring an explanation why it is frowned upon to rape children. A 'Pre-Departure Guide for Newcomers to Canada', published in 2025 focuses on newcomer rights rather than their responsibilities to the new country they will inhabit. 

 

Gently there are hints as to what is now of vital importance to this current progressive government; an acceptance of the presence of transgenderism, where readers are instructed that the LGBTQ-2 community in Canada is not only accepted, supported and valued, but so too is the right of the nation's children to question their from-birth designation as male or female. Issues such as 'lining up', 'making eye contact' and 'using underarm deodorant' are given their due place in the booklet.

 

Criminal activities are also addressed such as a jail term will come with carrying a firearm without a permit, and unwanted sexual touching or remarks may elicit a fine, or even prison. Bribery, polygamy, female genital mutilation and 'Making, sharing or owning photos of naked children', 'forcing others into marriage', and 'having sex with children', are similarly frowned upon and the letter of the law may be applied. Although truth to tell, the justice system goes easy on skin tones and ethnicity and cultures, with reduced sentences applied.

 

Family violence is frowned upon and "Killing a family member as a way to save a family's honour", is definitely unacceptable. Also addressed is the virtue of working for a living, rather than becoming wholly dependent on Canada Child Benefit payments which, when enough children in a family receive those generous benefits can sustain a family, without a breadwinner breaking a sweat. ($679.75 per month ($8,157 per year) for each child under 6, and $573.58 per month ($6,883 per year) for each child aged 6 to 17 for the 2026–2027 year.

 

What Muslim female dress means as a  wedge issue in Canada  TVO Today

 

 

Afghanistan's Starving Children

 

"One million children who are suffering from life-threatening severe acute malnutrition."

"If there is no treatment, and we are not able to act fast, that one million number are at risk of dying."

"Malnutrition plays a central role [in the growing number of deaths of very young children]."

"In parts of southern Afghanistan, some hospitals are now seeing three or four severely malnourished children for every available bed." 

UNICEF Afghanistan representative Tajudeen Oyewale

Three-year-old child tested for malnutrition. Photo: WFP/Isheeta Sumra

 

When the United States peremptorily pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, while the Taliban was on the march toward Kabul, incentivizing other NATO nations to do likewise -- all the work that had been done by the international coalition to bring that war-wearied country into the 21st century, the establishment of medical clinics, schools, water wells in remote villages went to naught. During the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, women were empowered, able to reach academic levels toward professions they aspired to, humanitarian groups set up shop in the  country to contribute to the modernization efforts and mitigate miserable living conditions -- all came to a grinding halt.

 

It took no time at all for the West-aligned Afghan government to dissolve in the pending approach of the Taliban forces. Government ministers fled abroad, government workers were cognizant that the Taliban meant to search them out, imprison and/or kill them. All the forward-looking enterprises that Afghanistan's population was able to develop were swiftly placed in mandatory retirement. The old misogynistic order where women were not permitted in public without wearing a burqa or abaya returned. Those employed by humanitarian agencies were forced to stop, and the humanitarian groups left the country.

 

Foreign investment that had been robust under the UN-approved occupation came to a stop. Afghanistan's assets abroad were frozen. Girls were no longer able to attend secondary, much less higher-level education past the primary grades. The strict separation of males and females became mandatory. Pre-teen girls were sold by their parents into marriages with older and elderly men to become their property. Men reverted to having multiple wives. Some Afghan women set up cottage industries in discreet locations where they could earn a basic living to keep food on the table.

 

Farida and her sickly children (R) need healthy food – which she cannot afford on the family's tiny income. Photo: WFP/Isheeta Sumra

 

The country copes with natural disasters like drought, flash floods, regional instability along with clashes with neighbouring countries over territorial and trade issues. And the country's children are in parlous condition, warns the United Nations, where across Afghanistan, 3.7 million children suffer from wasting disease; a condition linked to malnourishment. 

 

Babies under six months of age represent close to 40 percent of the children admitted to hospitals with severe wasting and grim medical complications. Over 80 percent of severe acute malnutrition cases in the country are represented by children under two years of age. The UNICEF country representative for Afghanistan speaks of a "worsening nutrition crisis" with over half a million children admitted to hospital in 2026 for high-risk, moderate and severe wasting conditions. 

 

Families, reports Tajudeen Oyewale, are scaling back nutritious food and serve increasingly smaller meals to deal with food insecurity; an "increasingly alarming picture", where infants' first solid food graduating from breast milk can be represented by bread and tea or watered-down yogurt, "and for a growing child, this is simply not enough". A vicious cycle of poor nourishment, developing of severe diarrhea or respiratory infections while becoming more malnourished.

 

Sediqa's two young girls count among nearly 3.7 million Afghan children projected to suffer from malnutrition this year. Her impoverished family often lives on a diet of bread and tea. Photo: WFP/Isheeta Sumra

 

Responsible Parenting Precludes Enabling Addictions

"He would bug us and for the longest time we said 'Absolutely not. It's illegal and blah blah blah'."

"I would say every single one of my son's [high school] friends has an account."

"Every single kid is betting, like everybody ... Eventually, I was just worn down ... Eventually he used my ID -- which I'm not proud of -- and opened an account." 

"My son knows kids who have lost thousands of dollars. One kid won $6,000 on slots at [school] lunch."

Kath (last name withheld) Toronto

 

"It seems like the government has off-loaded this to the families and parents."

"It's giving lip service to responsible gambling."

Harley Redlick, lawyer, responsible-gambling activist

 

"It's definitely widespread."

"And it's a problem because you're getting kids ... addicted to a behaviour that has real-life consequences as they get older."

"Kids are not going into personal bankruptcy. It's feeding this addictive personality." 

David (last name withheld) Toronto 

 

"This is not good for me."

"I have very, very very few friends who have actually made money [on gambling apps]. I know many people who are down by a significant amount of money."

"[I know of people who] have gambled during school and have won big and ... also lost." 

Matt, 17

 

Ontario Provincial Police spokeswoman Tracey Mellersh confirmed that to facilitate access to underage online gambling in the province of Ontario is illegal. No charges have ever to date been laid, however, with the Force choosing a harm reduction, education-based approach to warn parents and guardians of the law and the potential risks inherent in having young people betting.  

 

One person was charged in 2024 by the Ontario Provincial Police for a scheme involving a site called TopBets. In Orillia, Ontario several underage teens were said to have been lured into gambling, then, when they racked up debts were threatened with violence.

 

Kath explained confidentially that she had made use of her own credentials in setting up an account for her 16-year-old son on a government-regulated gambling app. Rules that ban anyone under 19 from using the sites after that ruse, did not apply to him. Her son, she said, had argued unceasingly that his friends were already engaged in doing that very same thing. Groups of boys gathered to bet on sports events or casino games, as a social activity. 

 

When Ontario decided to legalize commercial gambling apps it was a controversial move, and it has only become more controversial as time goes on. Over $100 billion was bet in the last year alone. And with that activity, gambling addiction has spiked, alongside bankruptcies linked to gambling, as well as suicides attributed to gambling losses. Underage teens -- mostly boys -- have taken to gambling in social groups, at home and while at school.

 

Lawyer and activist Harley Redlick reveals that numerous parents have confided to him that they opened accounts for their teenage children, referencing an 'epidemic' of internet betting among adolescents that has become an irresistible social phenomenon. Although hard data linked to the prevalence of underage betting is limited, the market continues to grow, taking the lives of adults and underage teens to new heights of addiction.

 

Mental Health and Online Gambling in Adolescents   Public Health Ontario

 

Last year's Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey revealed that online gambling by teens had "increased significantly" to the  extent that 12 percent of surveyed high school students stated they had bet on the sites, an increase from 2023's eight percent. Harley Redlick is executive director of the Canadian Addiction Recovery Association, who also teaches a professional-development course on gaming law at the Law Society of Ontario.

 

In his experience, he says, some youngsters will borrow IDs without permission in their anxiety to open accounts, taking photos of their parents to upload for their accounts. The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario regulator fined Betty Gaming Ltd. $120,000 for 'failures' whereby nine people under 19 created accounts, deposited money to gamble, while another 14 set up accounts without money being deposited. The age restriction is "one of the most basic and important safeguards" in the regulated Ontario system. 

 

"Something they do not know is that actually it's a crime", said Mina Hazar, responsible for a youth gambling awareness program for the YMCA. She hesitates to judge parents who set up gambling accounts for their children, suggesting they consider the long-term consequences -- such as risk of developing a gambling addiction. 

 

The  undeveloped brains of kids that age represents a perfect environment for growing addictions, points out Matthew Young of Gambling Research Exchange Ontario (GREO). In his opinion, relying on being able to monitor their internet gambling -- which might appear to be little different than any other activity on a smartphone -- might not be feasible.

 

Kids are gambling on sports and casino games in social groups, at home and even while at school. Photo by Ty Lim

 

"I get the sentiment of these parents -- this idea that 'I'd rather my kids drink in my basement because they're going to do it anyway'."

"[But] online gambling is very, very easy to hide. ... How do you keep an eye on it is the question?"

Matthew Young, GREO gambling research organization 

The Openly-Acknowledged Black Market in MOTS-c Peptide

"Turns out that tens of thousand of people are injecting themselves with MOTS-c. [That's] black market, illegal, from unknown sources, unknown purity,  unknown sterility, and I strongly object to that."

"We can't stop the black market. So I think it's a better choice to at least guarantee the quality, the sterility and require that real doctors are part of the process. I really think this is a better choice than just letting it go on the way it is." 

"Certain groups of people -- for example the fitness enthusiasts, which is the kind way to refer to gym rats -- those people take one figure from one paper done on mice and take it to become gospel." 

Dr. Pinchas Cohen, dean, USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology

 

"My impression is that the 'lesser of two evils' argument is a minority perspective. While it's true that most [pharmaceutical] compounders can likely [produce] purer versions of these peptides than what's in the grey market, that doesn't address potential inherent risks of the peptides themselves." 

"There's no special reason they should be allowed to bypass the standard clinical trial system just because there's a peptide fad driven by wellness influencers and telehealth firms." 

Professor Paul Knoepfler,  cell biology and human anatomy, UC Davis School of Medicine

 

Dr. Pinchas Cohen's laboratory at the School of Gerontology, USC Leonard Davis identified the MOTS-c peptide  as one of the thousands of peptides acting as chemical messengers in the human body. It was discovered when Dr. Cohen combed through the 97 percent of human DNA that does not encode for genes. Once dismissed as "junk DNA", or the "Dark genome", this biological hoard has been recognized as being full of hormones and microproteins playing vital roles in directing systems and processes in the body.

 

When he became aware his discovery was being promoted by longevity seekers, fitness enthusiasts and wellness influencers as "exercise in a bottle", he felt dismayed. While not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the peptide was available widely online, frequently found in vials marked "for research use only". Social media hype and a public consumer zest for experimental peptides has overwhelmed the public seeking magical fountains of youth and energy, and unregulated peptides now fuels a high-stakes federal government policy conflict.

 

Unsurprisingly, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a self-confessed "big fan" of peptide use personally, pledging to put an end to government's "aggressive suppression" of the peptides. Some of which, like insulin, human growth hormone and glucon-like peptide-1 have seen transformational therapeutic effects to humans. However, every one of these peptides (think Ozempic) on a pharmacy shelf has undergone decades of clinical trials and testing for safety.

 

Photo by Innerbody Research

 

The same cannot be said for MOTS-c and a host of other peptides now widely available online. Those wedded to their use claim the substances' effectiveness in aiding weight loss, boosting energy and muscle mass, frequently citing research conducted only on animals, or with a very limited number of humans. Leading to the situation where it is unknown how or when the peptides should be used for humans; no data exists that can attest to their safety and effectiveness.

 

An FDA committee was recently struck to vote whether to recommend compounding pharmacies be permitted to manufacture six different peptides currently available online: BPC-157, TB-500, KPV, epitalon Semax and MOTS-c. Last month, Health Canada announced that a Canadian court had approved their request to permanently ban a Quebec-based online store from selling unauthorized injectable peptides in Canada. 

 

Many of the members comprising the FDA committee work for telehealth, longevity and wellness companies that will profit from the regulation of peptides. Dr. Cohen arrived in Washington to speak before the committee; stating that he believed "quality-controlled, prescriber-supervised" compounding was the safest way forward. FDA staff who also spoke at the meeting advised against peptide compounding on the reasonable basis that insufficient safety data exists to justify the move.

 

It is unknown how long-term use of these peptides would affect humans. Claims by influencers that peptides have a positive effect on human weight loss, muscle mass, longevity and energy have been taken from effects seen on laboratory animals. Nor is it known what formula or dosage might be effective for human use. Molecules are viewed by scientists as a promising area of research where significant health breakthroughs could result. Rigorous science on the other hand takes time; guesswork is just that; unproven assumptions.   

 

viviana loza//Getty Images

 

"Peptides are neither miracle cures nor snake oil. They are signalling molecules. Some have strong evidence. Some have intriguing or early data. Some are wildly overhyped, and some probably should never leave the laboratory."

"Patients are looking for alternatives, and they are looking not at physicians. They're looking at this grey market source." 

Dr. Ben Gonzales, former emergency medicine physician, Walter Reed Army Medical Center 

 

"The big picture is that we're transitioning as a nation from the 20th-century model [in which] all health care was dictated by physicians and insurance companies to a new 21st-century model where consumers are demanding and receiving health and wellness services and products that they pay for in cash."

"I'm not saying that's a better model. But it's the model we're transitioning into."

Dr. Pinchas Cohen 

MOTS-c peptide hype

 

 

Canada's Ebola Quarantine Impacting Humanitarian Response

"To me, we're not stepping up in the way that we should be as a country that does have the ability to do it and changing the quarantine regulations is a low-stakes way of being able to do it."

"All the decisions that the Canadian government has decided to make over the past few months around the Ebola outbreak, none of them have been very forthright in saying, we understand that this is a global priority and as Canada we're going to step up to help in the ways that are equal to the capacities that we have in this country."

Lily-Madeleine Seguin, public health promotion advisor, Oxfam global team 

 

"[The government is] continually reviewing the measures alongside the latest evidence with international partners and will determine next steps before the existing measures are set to expire."

"[The temporary measures are not intended to eliminate all risk,] but to reduce the likelihood of importation [of Ebola], support early identification of potentially ill travellers, and therefore reduce the risk of potential spread to others in Canada." 

Karine LeBlanc, Health Canada communications adviser

Lily-Madeleine Seguin, public health promotion adviser woth Oxfam. The Canadian Press

 

Travellers returning from the Democratic Republic of Congo or from Uganda are advised by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to self-monitor for symptoms and only if they had a high risk exposure like direct contact with bodily fluid of an infected person, or close, face-to-face contact with someone coughing, vomiting or bleeding who has the virus, should they quarantine.

 

"I'm very critical about how Canada chose to implement their public health measures", commented Mylene Ratelle, hired as a health promotion manager at Doctors Without Borders who would have remained for longer in the DRC had she not needed to quarantine for three weeks at her Montreal apartment prior to the start of the fall semester, as a professor of public health. She faulted the lack of scientific basis for strict border measures enacted by Canada.

 

People who have been in casual contact with Ebola patients are not generally candidates to contract the disease. It is through direct contact with bodily fluids, such as blood, vomit and semen that spreads the virus. The Canadian government's mandatory 21-day quarantine set to expire, has been condemned by many humanitarian aid workers. The measures had been announced in May at the time of the FIFA World Cup which had strict rules for co-hosting countries. 

 

At the time, Canada's minister of health stated "It's not a question of science", but rather that of protecting people from the lasting trauma of past outbreaks when people from around the world converge en masse at such world events. Doctors Without Borders were critical of the measures that resulted in a dozen Canadians identified with valuable expertise cancelling their assignments as a result of the quarantine measures. MSF's Ebola response in the DRC had twenty-three Canadians in all, taking part. 

 

The Globe and Mail

 

"To me, it's quite egregious", said Roojin Habibi, research director of global health law at the  Global Strategy Lab, University of Ottawa and York University. The travel restrictions, she held, ignore expert guidance from the World Health Organization which stated that blanket travel restrictions are based not on science, but fear.

 

Canadian humanitarian aid workers are also concerned that an extension of the expiring regulations affecting Canadians and permanent residents of Canada returning from the DRC, Uganda or South Sudan could be detrimental to the response of the outbreak with their ability to respond stifled by the long quarantine period. This outbreak has been identified by the World Health Organization as the swiftest growing Ebola outbreak in history, as well as the deadliest. Africa's public health agency has reported over 2,500 deaths from over 5,000 infections.

 

Aid workers are also critical of the $8 million committed by the current Liberal government in support of the fight against the outbreak, particularly compared to the Conservative-led government's response in 2014 of $110 million related to financial assistance given by Canada to West Africa during that country's Ebola outbreak. 

 

The Globe and Mail

 

Canada's "Five-Alarm Fire"

"The numbers make it clear that Canada's founders and entrepreneurs are leaving in droves -- and they are taking the future value they will generate with them."

"Not only is it a 'today' problem. But this is a leak in one of our most valuable resources, and the compounding effects over time, I think, can be incredibly devastating for the Canadian economy."

"We talk a lot about positioning, we talk a lot about sovereignty, about making ourselves stronger internally."

"If the U.S. is raising walls and raising tariffs and doing more and more to put America first, I think the smartest response for Canada is to make Canada the obvious place for the next 517 founders to stay and build here." 

Lucy Hargreaves, co-founder Build Canada business advocacy group 

Clockwise from left, Ilya Sutskever, University of Toronto (OpenAI); Garrett Camp, University of Calgary (Uber); Chris Olah, University of Toronto (Anthropic); Jeff Skoll, University of Toronto (eBay); and Elon Musk, Queen’s University (SpaceX).

 

Canada is losing its best and brightest entrepreneurs as they pull up stakes after getting their education in their place of birth and head to greener pastures. Those greener pastures in the world of tech exist in the United States. While tariff threats issued to Canada from the current Washington administration  has moved the Liberal government to attempt diversification and rescue from Canada's traditional reliance on coasting along with the American economy as Canada's largest trading partner by far, no one in public office appears to much notice that tech brain drain.

 

A number of tech entrepreneurs, politicians and economists this week have weighed the data demonstrating just how large the problem of siphoning Canada's bright minds off to a place where a larger economy, more lenient tax rates and greater entrepreneurial opportunities exist, and finally that problem gained some needed focus. There are at least 517 U.S.-based tech firms, according to recent figures, with Canadian founders; entrepreneurs educated in Canada but high-tailing it to the U.S. Together they have raised over US$400 billion.

 

The pace of innovators who leave Canada for the United States doubled since 2023, with U.S. tech giants on a hiring spree to fulfill their ambitions surrounding artificial intelligence. Previously, just over 20 founders left for the U.S. annually. That figure rose to 60 in 2023, and 93 in 2024. 88 percent of those founders graduated from Canadian universities, University of Waterloo, University of Toronto and McGill University among them. 

 

 

Open AI co-founder Ilya Sutskever who attended University of Toronto, and Uber founder Garrett Camp who was raised in Calgary, are among them. Space X's Elon Musk, who has Canadian citizenship, as well as Anthropic's Chris Olah and eBay's Jeff Skoll are others involved in the exodus. Efforts to retain its most innovative people and ideas from moving to the U.S. where entrepreneurs can take advantage of the much larger capital investment pool and more committed pro-business policies, have failed to succeed. 

 

Drawing from the Dominion List, a database of U.S.-based companies with founders born or educated in Canada, Waterloo-based tech investor Jesse Rodgers studied the latest numbers indicating the number of founders who had left for American cities. His blog post surfaced recently just as voices began to weigh in on social media. According to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, this loss of talent is "driving entrepreneurs out of Canada with taxes, red tape and inflation", even as the Liberal government gives "handouts bailouts, and carveouts to the club of corporate insiders". 

 

Where observers are aligned, it is with the belief that Canada is losing strategic talent and ideas to the U.S. -- with less agreement on the reasons why, counterbalances the reality. Some are convinced that it is the huge pool of investors available just south of the border, hubs like New York City and Silicon Valley, in particular. Others are convinced of a lack of pro-business policies in Canada to compensate for the lack of scale in comparison to the U.S.

 

Ms. Hargreaves beliees that more generous capital gains taxes or reduced income taxes on top earners could help the retention of entrepreneurs. Andre Charoo, management partner at Maple VC, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund, feels that entrepreneurs simply move to the U.S. to be in the company of other successful people. Canada, says Mr. Charoo, lacks the density of people striving to build the next $1-billion success story.

 

"We produce some of the most ambitious people in the world, but ambitious people want to be around other ambitious people", he stated. Educated at the University of Toronto, Charoo helped launch the Canadian division of Uber, but moved in the early 2000s to California for the opportunities that could advantage him there. Of the 517 companies that Canadian and Canadian-educated funders started in the U.S., 287 are based in San Francisco, while New York hosts the next most, at 61. 

 

 

Astronomical Discoveries: Fastest Star in the Milky Way Orbiting Black Hole

"Decades carefully tracking stars orbiting our galaxy's central black hole, Sagittarius A*, have led to this  breakthrough discovery."

"Because it orbits so close to Sagittarius A*, S301 opens a new window to the fundamental properties of space-time in this extreme black-hole environment."

Reinhard Genzal, 2020 Nobel Laureate in physics, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Germany 

 

"What is special about this star is that it's orbiting Sagittarius A* on a very tight orbit, taking just 8.7 years to complete it."

"[The star gets roughly as close to the black hole as Saturn gets to our Sun, which is] unprecedented."

Felix Mang, PhD student, co-author of new study/discovery 

Dozens of stars race around the Milky Way’s giant black hole at high speeds.  ESO/L. Calçada

 

The fastest star in the Milky Way which zooms at 25,000 kilometres per second around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, has been discovered by astronomers. Named S301, the star orbits precipitously close to the black hole -- so much so that scientists are convinced that its close study may shed light on this cosmic monster that is the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. And in the process, enable them to validate -- or not -- Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. 

 

S301, two billion times fainter than the star Betelgeuse in our night sky, led the team of astronomers to make use of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope located in the Chilean desert. The presence of the star first came to notice in 2023, and has been tracked ever since, in its orbit. The star travels around 25,000 kilometres per second when it approaches closest to the irresistible gravity pull of the black star.

The star S301 orbits the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, in this annotated image from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

 

Its trajectory is 100,000 times speedier than that of a commercial airplane; over eight percent greater than the speed of light. It is known to be the fastest star that has ever been detected in the Milky Way galaxy. Among scientists, it is believed that S301 once was a partner of a binary star system, torn asunder through the irresistibly strong pull of the black hole. That theory had S301 trapped in the gravity of the black hole while its partner star was blasted outward with sufficient force to entirely take its leave of the galaxy.

 

In the year 2031, the star will make its next-closest approach to the black hole, at which time astronomers will plan another intense focus of the star's activity in the hope that data they collect from two completed orbits may give them the opportunity to determine the star's trajectory with sufficient precision that the black hole's rotation could be measured -- for as with most space objects, black holes are thought to spin.

 

According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a spinning black hole would drag space-time along with it, twisted in a manner that would affect and alter the orbits of surrounding stars. The astronomers anticipate that within the next ten years they will have the opportunity to study S301 for the direct purpose of measuring, for the first time, the spin of the black hole.

 

"Without this star, we would need to measure the motion of other stars for several more decades to get anywhere close to measuring the spin of the black hole", French astronomer and study co-author Juan Osorno explained, in reference to the study published in Nature. 

 

The image shows all known stars in the Galactic Center orbiting the central massive black hole Sgr A*. The central region is dominated by young, hot stars (blue), and a couple of cooler stars (orange/red). One of the cooler stars, S301, is approaching Sgr A* very closely on its elliptical orbit (red), about the distance Sun to planet Saturn. Sgr A* itself is surrounded by hot plasma, the light of which is warped due to the black hole’s strong gravity.   © MPE