“It’s a weird, bizarre place, and very hard for us to probe because there is a lot of dust between us and it; we can see things with infrared and radio waves but not necessarily with optical light.
“Now we’ve got a star that seems to have formed within the region and has escaped from it and, at 29,000 light-years from Earth, is now close enough for us to study in relative detail.
“And it seems to be perfectly normal, so that should tell us something about how stars are being formed near the Galactic centre and about the conditions there.”
Sagittarius A* (read: a-star) is a supermassive black hole located roughly 26,000 light-years or 152,844,260,000,000,000 miles from our planet.
The monstrous well of gravity is estimated to weight roughly four million times more than our Sun.
