Results concerning the centre of our galaxy

Abstract

For many years it was felt that, when a star collapsed, a white dwarf resulted if the mass of the original star was below the Chandrasekhar limit, a neutron star if the mass was somewhat larger but still less than four or five solar masses, but after that black holes were felt to provide the only possible final state. The extension of this hierarchy to include the possibility of quark, and even sub-quark, stars has been proposed and here is used to offer an alternative explanation for the recently published photograph, credited to Eckart and Genzel, purporting to show stars near the centre of our Galaxy moving at very high speeds. The same basic results are used also to consider the even more recent results of Schodel and collaborators concerning the detailed observations of a stellar orbit very close to the centre of our galaxy.