Table of Contents
How far across is the black hole in the Milky Way?
But these black holes are nothing compared to supermassive black holes, like Sagittarius A*, which lives at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. It covers a region about 14.6 million miles in diameter. That’s roughly 168 Jupiters across, and inside is the same amount of mass as 4 million suns combined.
Is the Milky Way close to a black hole?
Observational evidence indicates that almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. The Milky Way has a supermassive black hole in its Galactic Center, which corresponds to the location of Sagittarius A*.
How far is the farthest black hole?
This black hole is 1,500 light years away from Earth, still inside the Milky Way galaxy.
Does the Milky Way have a black hole?
The only objects with that much density and gravity are black holes, but in this case, a black hole with millions of times the mass of our own Sun: a supermassive black hole. With the discovery of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, astronomers found evidence that there are black holes at the heart of every galaxy.
Are there any black holes in the Milky Way?
There’s a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. And not just any black hole, it’s a supermassive black hole with more than 4.1 million times the mass of the Sun. It’s right over there, in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation . Located just 26,000 light-years away.
How many black holes are in the Milky Way?
A study, published in the journal Nature on Monday, has discovered over 100 stellar-mass black holes hidden within a cluster of stars moving across the Milky Way. Conceptually that might sound alarming, but these ones are so far away that scientists aren’t treating them as a direct threat to Earth.
What is the black hole in the Milky Way called?
A supermassive black hole (SMBH or SBH) is the largest type of black hole, on the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses (M☉), and is found in the centre of almost all currently known massive galaxies. In the case of the Milky Way, the SMBH corresponds with the location of Sagittarius A*.