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the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy
made up of hundreds of billions of stars
and planets if we were able to take a
picture of it it would look something
like this
it measures a mind-boggling 120,000
lightyears across and is estimated to be
about thirteen point six billion years
old we are located in a region called
the Orion Arm which is around 26,000
light-years from the center the galactic
center can be found in the constellation
of Sagittarius and like many other large
galaxies within the universe the Milky
Way harbors a cosmic terror at its heart
a supermassive black hole
black holes are cosmic objects that are
extremely dense and exhibit immense
gravitational forces they are formed as
a result of matter collapsing in on
itself creating regions with huge
amounts of mass concentrated into an
incredibly small area
the gravitational pull of a black hole
is so strong that nothing can escape it
once the event horizon has been crossed
currently there are three different
types the stellar mass which are the
smallest
the intermediate-mass which are
somewhere in the middle and the largest
the supermassive a supermassive black
hole or SMB h for short contains between
a million and a billion times more mass
than a typical stellar-mass black hole
and can be found at the center of large
galaxies the supermassive black hole
that lurks within our galaxy's center
has been named Sagittarius a star and
has been estimated to be roughly 4.1
million times as massive as the Sun
normally the region from which
Sagittarius a star exists is shrouded by
clouds of gas and dust making the area
invisible from Earth but recently
scientists working with a new radio
telescope called meerkat released an
image described as the clearest view yet
although the supermassive black hole
cannot actually be seen due to the fact
that light cannot escape its
gravitational pull the area around it
can this is because the meerkat
telescope can pick up radio frequencies
which penetrate the dust and clouds that
exist within the Milky Way's heart
revealing this terrifying but
magnificent image of our galaxy's
supermassive black hole scientists know
that the center of the Milky Way
contains a supermassive black hole
because they have observed entire stars
zipping past an invisible object
indicating that whatever lurks at the
center holds a colossal amount of power
the only known objects discovered so far
within the universe that have this much
density and gravity are supermassive
black holes there are many theories on
how supermassive black holes form and
although black holes cannot currently be
directly observed the environment that
they exist and interact with can be one
idea is that's during the early stages
of the universe these black holes were a
lot
smaller in size then over time they
absorbed massive amounts of gas and dust
merging with other black holes growing
larger and larger until they ended up
the colossal monsters they are today
however the agreed reason for why these
supermassive black holes grow so big is
still being researched it is pretty
incredible to think that there is a
colossal black hole lurking within the
core of the Milky Way but compared to
other galaxies Sagittarius a star is
actually fairly small much larger black
holes have been discovered some
containing tens of billions more mass
than the Sun although scientists are
constantly studying black holes it is
currently still a mystery as to how they
can become so large but hopefully one
day that mystery will be solved I really
hope you enjoyed this video if you did
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if you haven't already thank you so much
for watching and I'll see you next time
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