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| Black Hole |
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy made up of hundreds of billions of stars and planets. It measures a mind-boggling 120,000 light years across and is estimated to be about thirteen point six billion years old. We are located in a region called the Orion Arm which is around 26,000 light-years from the center the galactic center.
It can be found in the constellation of Sagittarius and like many other large galaxies within the universe the Milky Way harbors a cosmic terror at its heart a supermassive black hole. Black holes are cosmic objects that are extremely dense and exhibit immense gravitational forces. They are formed as a result of matter collapsing in on itself creating regions with huge amounts of mass concentrated into an incredibly small area. The gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong that nothing can escape it once the event horizon has been crossed. Currently there are three different types the stellar mass which are the smallest the intermediate-mass which are somewhere in the middle and the largest the supermassive.
A supermassive black hole contains between a million and a billion times more mass than a typical stellar-mass black hole and can be found at the center of large galaxies. The supermassive black hole that lurks within our galaxy's center has been named Sagittarius A* and has been estimated to be roughly 4.1 million times as massive as the Sun. Normally the region from which Sagittarius A* exists is shrouded by clouds of gas and dust making the area invisible from Earth. But recently scientists working with a new radio telescope called MeerKAT released an image described as the clearest view. Yet although the supermassive black hole cannot actually be seen due to the fact that light cannot escape its gravitational pull and the area around it can. This is because the MeerKAT telescope can pick up radio frequencies which penetrate the dust and clouds that exist within the Milky Way's heart revealing this terrifying but magnificent image of our galaxy's supermassive black hole. Scientists know that the center of the Milky Way contains a supermassive black hole because they have observed entire stars zipping past an invisible object indicating that whatever lurks at the center holds a colossal amount of power. The only known objects discovered so far within the universe that have this much density and gravity are supermassive black holes.
There are many theories on how supermassive black holes form and although black holes cannot currently be directly observed the environment that they exist and interact with can be one idea is that's during the early stages of the universe. These black holes were a lot smaller in size then over time they absorbed massive amounts of gas and dust merging with other black holes growing larger and larger until they ended up the colossal monsters they are today. However the agreed reason for why these supermassive black holes grow so big is still being researched. It is pretty incredible to think that there is a colossal black hole lurking within the core of the Milky Way but compared to other galaxies Sagittarius A* is actually fairly small, much larger black holes have been discovered some containing tens of billions more mass than the Sun. Although scientists are constantly studying black holes it is currently still a mystery as to how they can become so large but hopefully one day that mystery will be solved.