Astronomers have spotted the fastest star ever, moving at 8 per cent the speed of light. The star, called S4714, orbits close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way and could be the best place in the galaxy to test Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

It’s hard to spot stars orbiting our galaxy’s central black hole, called Sagittarius A*, because the galaxy gets increasingly crowded the closer you get to its middle. Florian Peissker at the University of Cologne in Germany and his …