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June 6, 2022

Distance of supermassive black hole Sgr A* to M87*

While Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, is the supermassive black hole in the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, the supermassive black hole M87* resides more than 55,000,000 light-years from Earth.

This still is from the NSF video Introducing Sagittarius A* (the Milky Way Black Hole).

Learn more in the NSF news release Astrophysicists detect first black hole-neutron star mergers and in this "Science Matters" story. Or learn more about black holes and how they're studied. (Date of image: 2022; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: June 6, 2022)

Credit: National Science Foundation/Keyi "Onyx" Li


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