Supermassive Black Hole in the Milky Way Galaxy

From a distance, our galaxy would look like a flat spiral, some 100,000 light years across, with pockets of gas, clouds of dust, and about 400 billion stars rotating around the galaxys center. Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of the galactic center. And yet, the clues have been piling up, that something important, something strange is going on in there. Astronomers tracking stars in the center of the galaxy have found the best proof to date that black holes exist. Now, they are shooting for the first direct image of a black hole.

From a distance, our galaxy would look something like this.

A flat spiral, some 100,000 light years across, with pockets of gas, clouds of dust, and about 400 billion stars rotating around the galaxy’s center.

That center — bulging up and out of the galactic disk — is tightly packed with stars.

Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of this so-called “bulge.”

And yet, the clues have been piling up, that something important…something strange… is going on in there.

The first to take notice was the physicist Karl Jansky back in the 1930s.

He was asked by his employer, Bell Telephone Labs, to investigate sources of static that might interfere with what it saw as the killer app of its time… radio voice transmissions.

Using this ungainly radio receiver… Jansky methodically scanned the airwaves. He documented thunderstorms, near and far… and another signal he could not explain.

It sounded like steam — a hiss of radio noise. Jansky narrowed it to a spot in the constellation of Sagittarius, in the direction of the center of the galaxy.

Located within a larger pattern of radio emissions… … Jansky’s sighting would become known as Sagittarius A*.

The word of Jansky’s finding got out. He assured the public that it was not aliens seeking contact.

But that’s just about all anyone could say… for o