Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole is Closer than Astronomers Thought | Astronomy - Sci-News.com

The distance between our Solar System and Sagittarius A*, the 4-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, is approximately 25,800 light-years, about 1,900 light-years closer than previous estimate, according to an analysis of data from the Japanese VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometer) project VERA (VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry).

Position and velocity map of the Milky Way Galaxy; arrows show position and velocity data for 224 objects used to model the Galaxy; the solid black lines show the positions of the Galaxy’s spiral arms; the colors indicate groups of objects belonging the same arm.

Tomoya Hirota, an astronomer from the Mizusawa VLBI Observatory at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Department of Astronomical Sciences at SOKENDAI, and his colleagues from the VERA Collaboration.

Using data from the first VERA astrometry catalog, the astronomers modeled the structure of the Milky Way to estimate the fundamental parameters such as the distance toward the Galactic center and the velocity of the Sun around it.