Depth 45 · Supermassive black hole

Sagittarius A*

Sagittarius A* is the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, about four million times the mass of the Sun. Decades of tracking stars that orbit it earned a share of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, and in 2022 the Event Horizon Telescope released the first image of its shadow.

Fact sheet

Type: Supermassive black hole
Distance: About 26,700 light-years from Earth
Size: About 4 million times the mass of the Sun; its shadow spans about half the width of Mercury's orbit
Constellation: Sagittarius
Position in the sky: Right ascension 17h 46m, declination −29° 01′
Seeing it from Earth: It cannot be seen in visible light because thick dust blocks the view toward the galactic centre, but it is studied in radio waves, infrared and X-rays in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.
On the voyage: Depth 45, in the Galactic core and beyond section of the route, between Eta Carinae and the Large Magellanic Cloud

Things to know

On 12 May 2022 the Event Horizon Telescope team released the first image of Sagittarius A*, made by linking eight radio observatories around the world into one Earth-sized virtual telescope. ESO
The image is based on observations from 2017 and took more than 300 researchers from 80 institutes about five years to produce. ESO
Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez shared half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy, with the other half going to Roger Penrose. ESO
The star S2 circles the black hole every 16 years, and at its closest pass in May 2018 it came within about 20 billion km while moving at almost 3% of the speed of light. ESO
Tracking S2 with ESO's GRAVITY instrument pinned the distance to the black hole at about 8,180 parsecs, with an uncertainty of only about 0.3%. arXiv

Sources

Reach depth 45 on a voyage to fly past Sagittarius A* yourself. Every right answer warps your ship one stop deeper.

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