Zooming into Sagittarius A*

Zooming into the heart of the Milky Way to see stars as observed by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (the last observation being from 2019). Zooming further in reveals stars even closer to the black hole, observed with the GRAVITY instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometry in mid-2021. Read more from ESO.

Using Gemini North of the international Gemini Observatory, a program of NSF’s NOIRLab and ESO’s VLT, astronomers have measured more precisely than ever before the position and velocity of four stars called S2, S29, S38, and S55 which are orbiting the black hole Sagittarius A*, and found them to be moving in a way that shows that the mass in the center of the Milky Way is almost entirely due to the black hole, leaving very little room for anything else.