The Black Hole at the Center

(FTB) – Mano Singham:

This image was published just this past week and revealed at a press conference.

About 27,000 light-years away sits a massive astrophysical object, some four million times the mass of our sun, surrounded by swirling super-hot gasses. The existence of this supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* has been theorized for decades as astronomers observed nearby stars orbiting something invisible, compact and very massive at the center of the Milky Way. But they have never seen what it is – until now. …

singham at-the-center-of-our-galaxy

Wikipedia: Event Horizon Telescope

The Andromeda-Milky Way-Collision Uncertainty

(Syfy Wire::Bad Astronomy) – Phil Plait:

We’re trying to measure the apparent motions of stars over time. Updated data from Gaia are expected in early 2022, and another release will occur after all five years of the nominal mission are processed, and are expected to be far more accurate than previous data.

So give astronomers a few more years and these numbers should tighten up. And then, hopefully, we’ll know for sure whether in an eon or four we’ll need to either fasten our seat belts for a cosmic collision or watch as Andromeda safely flies past us a million or two light years distant.

Patience. …

syfy andromeda-galaxymilky

Sagittarius A*: Peering Into The Heart of Darkness

(PhysOrg.com) – Astronomers have long known that the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, known as Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A* for short), is a particularly poor eater. …

http://www.physorg.com/news181933944.html

Phil Plait: The Milky Way bulges with cannibalized corpses!

(Discover Magazine) – Some are bigger, some smaller, but pretty much every spiral galaxy we see has a roughly spherical puffy bulge of stars in its core …

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/11/25/the-milky-way-bulges-with-cannibalized-corpses/