Abstract

The black hole in the Galactic center, Sgr A*, is prototypical of ultra-low-fed galactic nuclei. The discovery of a handful of gas clumps with masses on the order of a few Earth masses in its immediate vicinity provides a gas reservoir sufficient to power Sgr A*. In particular, the gas cloud G2 is of interest due to its extreme orbit, on which it passed at a pericenter distance of around 100 AU and notably lost kinetic energy during the fly-by due to interaction with the black hole accretion flow. Thirteen years prior to G2, a similar gas cloud called G1, passed Sgr A* on a similar orbit. The origin of G2 remained a topic of discussion, with models including a central (stellar) source still proposed as alternatives to pure gas clouds. Here, we report the orbit of a third gas clump moving along (nearly) the same orbital trace. Since the probability of finding three stars on such similar orbits is very low, this strongly argues against stellar-based source models. Instead, we show that the gas streamer G1-2-3 plausibly originates from the stellar wind of the massive binary star IRS 16SW. This claim is substantiated by the fact that the small differences between the three orbits - the orientations of the orbital ellipses in their common plane as a function of time - are consistent with the orbital motion of IRS 16SW.