Galactic Center

The Galactic Center, as seen by one of the 2MASS infrared telescopes, is located in the bright upper left portion of the image.
Marked location of the Galactic Center.
A starchart of the night sky towards the Galactic Center.

The Galactic Center is the rotational center and the barycenter of the Milky Way.[1][2] Its central massive object is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses, which is called Sagittarius A*,[3][4][5] a compact radio source which is almost exactly at the galactic rotational center. The Galactic Center is approximately 8 kiloparsecs (26,000 ly) away from Earth[3] in the direction of the constellations Sagittarius, Ophiuchus, and Scorpius, where the Milky Way appears brightest, visually close to the Butterfly Cluster (M6) or the star Shaula, south to the Pipe Nebula.

There are around 10 million stars within one parsec of the Galactic Center, dominated by red giants, with a significant population of massive supergiants and Wolf–Rayet stars from star formation in the region around 1 million years ago. The core stars are a small part within the much wider galactic bulge.

  1. ^ Overbye, Dennis (31 January 2022). "An Electrifying View of the Heart of the Milky Way – A new radio-wave image of the center of our galaxy reveals all the forms of frenzy that a hundred million or so stars can get up to". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 February 2022.
  2. ^ Heywood, I.; et al. (28 January 2022). "The 1.28 GHZ MeerKAT Galactic Center Mosaic". The Astrophysical Journal. 925 (2): 165. arXiv:2201.10541. Bibcode:2022ApJ...925..165H. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac449a. S2CID 246275657.
  3. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference GRAVITY was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference EHS was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference gillessenetal2009 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

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