Stars around a Black Hole in the Milky Way

Andrea Ghez et al of the UCLA Astronomy Department's Galactic Center Group published a paper in Nature in 2000 where they observe orbits of a dozen individual stars near the center of our galaxy. They used these observations to predict the position of a supermassive black hole there. This movie shows these observations, with their extrapolated orbits. The side of the initial box is about 0.8 parsecs (15 trillion miles), while the cross in the center is the position of the black hole.