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Loading contentThe supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2022.
black_hole:sagittarius-a-starDataset membership
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Sagittarius A* is the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, with a mass of about 4 million solar masses inferred from the orbits of nearby stars (2020 Nobel Prize in Physics).
Source: European Southern Observatory
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Real, source-backed references — primary papers first, then datasets and institutional sources. Formatted through the citation engine; nothing is fabricated.
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration · The Astrophysical Journal Letters 930, L12 · 2022
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration · doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ac6674
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (2022). First Sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope Results. I.. The Astrophysical Journal Letters 930, L12. Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ac6674
@misc{cite:eht-sgra-2022,
title = {First Sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope Results. I.},
author = {Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration},
organization = {Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration},
howpublished = {The Astrophysical Journal Letters 930, L12},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.3847/2041-8213/ac6674},
url = {https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ac6674},
note = {First image of the Milky Way's central black hole, Sagittarius A*.}
}European Southern Observatory
European Southern Observatory (n.d.). The Galactic Centre black hole — ESO. European Southern Observatory. https://www.eso.org/
@misc{cite:eso-sagittarius-a-star,
title = {The Galactic Centre black hole — ESO},
organization = {European Southern Observatory},
year = {n.d.},
url = {https://www.eso.org/},
note = {Stellar-orbit monitoring of Sagittarius A* (2020 Nobel Prize).}
}2020
The Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize (2020). The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020. The Nobel Prize. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/
@misc{cite:nobel-physics-2020,
title = {The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020},
organization = {The Nobel Prize},
year = {2020},
url = {https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/},
note = {Penrose; Genzel & Ghez (supermassive compact object at the Galactic centre).}
}How Sagittarius A* connects across Asteria Star — scientific, cultural, and astrological links are kept separate.
The barred spiral galaxy that contains the Solar System, the Sun, and all stars visible to the naked eye.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a NASA space telescope launched in 1999 that observes the universe in X-ray wavelengths.
The supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87, the first black hole ever directly imaged, in 2019.
Over three decades, the teams of Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez tracked stars orbiting the centre of the Milky Way, revealing a four-million-solar-mass black hole, Sagittarius A*.
The boundary around a black hole beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.
A region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.
A black hole of millions to billions of solar masses, found at the centre of most large galaxies.
The Event Horizon Telescope's 2022 image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Galaxy.
From a strange mathematical solution that many thought unphysical, through the theoretical work that made them respectable and the observations that made them real, to the imaging of a black hole's shadow and the star orbits that prove one lurks at the Milky Way's heart.
The crowded, dust-shrouded core of the Milky Way, about 26,000 light-years away, home to a dense star cluster and the four-million-solar-mass black hole Sagittarius A*. Hidden at optical wavelengths, it is studied in radio, infrared, and X-rays, and its stars' orbits weigh the central black hole directly.
The stretching of light to longer wavelengths as it climbs out of a gravitational well, a prediction of general relativity. It is extreme near a black hole's event horizon, where light is redshifted without limit, and has been measured for the Sun, for white dwarfs, and even for atomic clocks at different heights on Earth.
The idealised, spherically symmetric capture of surrounding gas by a compact object, worked out by Hermann Bondi in 1952. It sets a benchmark rate at which a black hole or neutron star can swallow the gas around it, and underlies estimates of how quiescent supermassive black holes such as Sgr A* are fed.
The compact object of Cygnus X-1 — the first widely accepted black hole. A bright X-ray source in Cygnus discovered in 1964, it is a stellar-mass black hole of roughly twenty-one solar masses pulling gas from its blue-supergiant donor star (HD 226868). It was the subject of a famous bet between Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, which Hawking conceded in 1990.
The supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87, the first black hole ever directly imaged, in 2019.
A stellar-mass black hole of about nine solar masses in a binary system in Cygnus, and one of the nearest black holes with a precisely measured distance from radio parallax. Normally quiet, it erupted in a dramatic X-ray and radio outburst in June 2015 — a nearby microquasar caught devouring gas from its companion.
Facts on this topic will be cited from these primary and reference sources.
Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.
Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.
European missions, observatories, and space science imagery.