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After 16 years of research, teams of American and European scientists have compiled the most complete portrait of the gigantic black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, plotting its gravity-bending mass as being equivalent to a staggering 4 million suns.
The researchers from Germany and the University of California, Los Angeles, also pinpoint the distance to the center of the galaxy at 27,000 light-years.
While neither figure differs markedly from previous estimates of the black hole’s size and distance, it is the most conclusive proof to date that our galaxy of billions of stars is indeed centered on an object of such tremendous power that it gobbles all light and matter in its neighborhood.
