Observations of the star closest to the heart of the Milky Way confirms the existence of a colossal black hole there, astronomers announced Wednesday.
The star passes within 17 light-hours of a compact radio source known as Sagittarius A, pegged as the galactic center, and completes an oval orbit around the super hot spot every 15.2 years.
The orbital attributes mean that the entire mass of the interior object, between 2.6 million and 3.7 million times that of the sun, is crammed within a space about three times the size of our solar system.
The staggering density could only result from a supermassive black hole, according to physicist Rainer Schoedel, who with colleagues published the findings in this week's journal Nature.
"We can now confidently say that a black hole does indeed exist at the center of our galaxy," said Schoedel, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany.
