rotational center of the Milky Way galaxy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Galactic Centre (or Galactic Center) is the rotational center of the Milky Way galaxy.
It is a supermassive black hole of 4,100 ± 0.034 million solar masses. It powers the compact radio source Sagittarius A*.[1][2][3][4]
It is 8 ± 0.4 kiloparsecs (26,100 ± 1,300 ly) away from Earth[5] in the direction of the constellations Sagittarius, Ophiuchus, and Scorpius where the Milky Way appears brightest.
Walter Baade searched for the centre of the Milky Way galaxy in the mid-1940s. He used the 100-inch (2.5 m) Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California.
Up until then the structure and position of the galactic center was not known for sure.[6]
In 2006, the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS) conducted a survey of 180,000 stars for seven days. The objective was to detect extrasolar planets by the transit method.[7]
OGLE and other observation programs have successfully detected extrasolar planets orbiting around central bulge stars in this area by the gravitational microlensing method.
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