Mondo Knows Facts
A supermassive black hole sits at the centre of the Milky Way
Sagittarius A star contains four million times the mass of our Sun
Located about 26,000 light-years from Earth, Sagittarius A* is the supermassive black hole at the gravitational heart of the Milky Way. By tracking the high-speed orbits of nearby stars over decades, astronomers calculated that this compact central object packs four million solar masses into a tiny space.
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More facts like this
Black holes slowly evaporate over time via Hawking radiationQuantum effects near the event horizon cause black holes to lose massThe Event Horizon Telescope captured the first direct image of a black holeA global network of radio telescopes imaged the supermassive black hole in M87The Milky Way is pulled towards a vast gravitational featureA massive concentration of galaxy clusters draws home galaxy at high speedThe Milky Way belongs to a cluster of over fifty galaxiesThe Local Group spans ten million light-years and is led by AndromedaThe Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda GalaxyIn four billion years our home galaxy will merge with its nearest large neighbourObjects entering a black hole undergo spaghettificationExtreme gravitational gradients stretch falling matter into long thin strings
Tags: black hole, milky way, sagittarius a
A supermassive black hole sits at the centre of the Milky Way: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Sagittarius A star contains four million times the mass of our Sun. The figure is taken from ESA, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a space fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Space shelf, one of 1,090 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
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