“These objects look like gas and behave like stars,” said co-author Andrea Ghez, UCLA’s Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics and director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group about a new class of bizarre objects with orbits ranging from about 100 to 1,000 years at the center of our galaxy, not far from the supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* that look compact most of the time and stretch out when their orbits bring them closest to the black hole.