Located in the center of the Milky Way and surrounded by a hot gas cloud — black hole astronomers Sagittarius A*

Atacama Large Millimeter Array, an astronomical observatory in Chile, revealed a flickering black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Image of Sagittarius A* object, edited by scientists from Keio University.

The black hole Sagittarius A* is located in the center of the Milky Way at a distance of 26 thousand light years and is surrounded by a hot radiating gas cloud with a diameter of about 1.8 pc. Astronomers suggest that its mass is 4.3 million solar masses, and its radius is not more than 45 a. e.

Unlike many supermassive black holes, Sagittarius A* is in a kind of hibernation and does not absorb matter. Due to this, it does not emit energy and red-hot matter - jets, therefore it is practically invisible to conventional telescopes. This allowed several tens of stars and large clouds of gas to exist, which formed in the immediate vicinity of Sagittarius A*.

The black hole itself does not produce any radiation: its source is a gaseous disk around Sagittarius A*. The gas around the black hole does not go directly into the gravitational well, but rotates around the black hole, forming an accretion disk. Fluctuations in its brightness - a kind of flicker - and astronomers discovered.