This figure shows the locations of the radio telescopes linked together to observe the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way. Credit: Ortiz-LeOn et al.
At the heart of our galaxy’s center is SagA*, a supermassive black hole containing ~4 million solar-masses of material. SgrA* is relatively faint, unlike the supermassive black holes in some other galaxies. This is probably because, unlike its active cousins, it is not aggressively accreting material and so is neither heating up its environment nor ejecting particularly intense jets of fast-moving charged particles. Of course, it is also faint because it is located about 25 000 light years from Earth and because it is shrouded in absorbing, intervening dust...
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