Can stars form around black holes?

Artist’s illustration of a star found in the closest orbit known around a black hole in the globular cluster named 47 Tucanae.

In the 1930s, when physicist and engineer Karl Jansky pointed his radio antenna towards the center of our galaxy, he detected a continual source of radio waves. After some analysis, scientists realized these radio waves were being emitted by something vastly further from our planet than the sun — but oddly enough, they were comparable in energy to the waves we do receive from the sun. 

With this information, they began to suspect something truly powerful must be lurking in the center of the Milky Way.