Distance to the Galactic Center Animation of a barred galaxy like the Milky Way showing the presence of an X-shaped bulge. In July 2022, astronomers reported the discovery of massive amounts of prebiotic molecules, including some associated with RNA, in the Galactic Center of the Milky Way Galaxy. In the equatorial coordinate system the location is: RA 17 h 45 m 40.04 s, Dec −29° 00′ 28.1″ ( J2000 epoch). In 1958 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to adopt the position of Sagittarius A as the true zero coordinate point for the system of galactic latitude and longitude. They named an intense point-source near the center of this belt Sagittarius A, and realised that it was located at the very center of the Galaxy, despite being some 32 degrees south-west of the conjectured galactic center of the time. By 1954 they had built an 80-foot (24 m) fixed dish antenna and used it to make a detailed study of an extended, extremely powerful belt of radio emission that was detected in Sagittarius. Īt Dover Heights in Sydney, Australia, a team of radio astronomers from the Division of Radiophysics at the CSIRO, led by Joseph Lade Pawsey, used ' sea interferometry' to discover some of the first interstellar and intergalactic radio sources, including Taurus A, Virgo A and Centaurus A. This gap has been known as Baade's Window ever since.

He found that near the star Alnasl (Gamma Sagittarii) there is a one-degree-wide void in the interstellar dust lanes, which provides a relatively clear view of the swarms of stars around the nucleus of the Milky Way Galaxy. In the early 1940s Walter Baade at Mount Wilson Observatory took advantage of wartime blackout conditions in nearby Los Angeles to conduct a search for the center with the 100-inch (250 cm) Hooker Telescope. Harlow Shapley stated in 1918 that the halo of globular clusters surrounding the Milky Way seemed to be centered on the star swarms in the constellation of Sagittarius, but the dark molecular clouds in the area blocked the view for optical astronomy. Immanuel Kant stated in Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) that a large star was at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and that Sirius might be the star. The available information about the Galactic Center comes from observations at gamma ray, hard (high-energy) X-ray, infrared, submillimetre, and radio wavelengths. Because VISTA has a camera sensitive to infrared light, it can see through much of the dust blocking the view in visible light, although many more opaque dust filaments still show up well in this picture.īecause of interstellar dust along the line of sight, the Galactic Center cannot be studied at visible, ultraviolet, or soft (low-energy) X-ray wavelengths. The core stars are a small part within the much wider galactic bulge.ĭiscovery This pan video gives a closer look at a huge image of the central parts of the Milky Way made by combining thousands of images from ESO's VISTA telescope on Paranal in Chile and compares it with the view in visible light. 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 Galactic Center is approximately 8 kiloparsecs (26,000 ly) away from Earth 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. Its central massive object is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses, which is called Sagittarius A*, a compact radio source which is almost exactly at the galactic rotational center. The Galactic Center is the rotational center, the barycenter, of the Milky Way galaxy. A starchart of the night sky towards the 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. For the book series, see Galactic Center Saga. For the general concept, see Galaxy § Center. This article is about the center of the Milky Way.

Center of a blackhole