The Milky Way contains a supermassive black hole about four million times the mass of the Sun.
Notes on verification
Confirmed by multiple independent, high-quality sources including NASA, Harvard CfA, Britannica, and Nobel Prize committee materials, with measurements from Nobel-winning research using decades of stellar orbit tracking and further corroborated by ESO and Event Horizon Telescope observations. [cascade flags: aggregator_dropped_primary_exists,wikipedia_dropped_other_sources_exist | tier=silver indep_score=1.0 clusters=5 claim_tier=notable | framework convergence=partial on Stellar orbit dynamics (S2/S0-2 star orbital tracking) around Sgr A*, cross-validated by independent teams and later by EHT imaging and gas-cloud dynamics (upstreams: Reinhard Genzel's Galactic Center group (MPE), Andrea Ghez's UCLA group (Keck Telescope observations), GRAVITY Collaboration) — publishers independent, evidence may not be | kind=empirical eligibility=high]
Sources
- A third of black holes in the Universe could be hiding from view | BBC Sky at Night Magazine (seed:space_and_astronomy)
- https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/supermassive-black-hole-our-galaxy (corroboration)
- https://www.nasa.gov/universe/nasa-animation-sizes-up-the-universes-biggest-black-holes/ (corroboration)
- https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/popular-information/ (corroboration)
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20081 (corroboration)
- https://www.science.org/content/article/new-method-reveals-perhaps-most-massive-black-hole-yet-spotted (corroboration)