"Black holes are not as destructive as we thought," the study's lead author said.

The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is associated with wanton destruction, but a recent discovery throws that assumption into question.

A team of international researchers recently spotted a pair of stars orbiting around one another in surprisingly close proximity to Sagittarius A*, our galaxy's famed enormous black hole.

While such stellar pairs are common in the observable universe, areas near supermassive black holes have long been thought to have gravity too intense for stellar systems to be stable. The discovery, which relied on data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, marks the first time that a binary star system has been observed in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, according to a press release.

Astrophysicists behind the find claim the discovery not only will help scientists understand how stars can survive in extreme gravity, but could even be the tip of the iceberg before planets themselves are detected near the black hole.

"Black holes are not as destructive as we thought," said study lead author Florian Peissker, a researcher at the University of Cologne in Germany, in a statement.

Binary stars often appear as a single object in the night sky to the naked eye, but can often be detected with telescopes and the data they provide.

The newly-discovered binary star system, which is home to two stars gravitationally bound to one another, was found in a dense stellar cluster orbiting Sagittarius A*, which has an estimated mass millions of times that of our sun.

The researchers studying 15 years of observed data from the cluster found that what they thought was one star was in fact a stellar pair, due to the regular variations in its velocity.

The finding may have come just in time - at least, relative to the age of our universe. The young stellar system, estimated to be only 2.7 million years old, is expected to merge into a single star within about a million years due to the gravitational force from Sagittarius A*.

"This provides only a brief window on cosmic timescales to observe such a binary system," said study co-author Emma Bordier from the University of Cologne, in a statement. "And we succeeded."

Researchers wonder what else could exist near black hole

For many years, scientists similarly believe that the extreme environments near supermassive black holes prevented even single new stars from forming there before those were observed near Sagittarius A*. Now, the researchers said their findings prove that young binary stars also have the potential to form in such harsh conditions.

The precise nature of many of the other objects - and, perhaps, even planets - orbiting Sagittarius A*, as well as how they could have formed so close to the supermassive black hole, remain a mystery. The researchers suggest that additional observations are warranted.

"Our discovery lets us speculate about the presence of planets, since these are often formed around young stars," Peissker said. "It seems plausible that the detection of planets in the galactic center is just a matter of time."

The study was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.