Find the center of the Milky Way: This Week in Astronomy with Dave Eicher

The center of the Milky Way is located in the constellation Sagittarius. Credit: Gianni Tumino

Hi folks, tune in every week of 2023 for the best in astronomy from Astronomy Editor Dave Eicher, brought to you by Celestron. Dave’s weekly video series will cover all the latest sky events, scientific results, overviews of cosmic mysteries, and more!

This week, we’re talking about the center of the Milky Way — and how to find it. If you can locate the open cluster M7 in Scorpius and the Lagoon Nebula (M8) in Sagittarius, take the midpoint of a line between them, and then look just off to the right by about 3°, you’ll be looking straight into the heart of our galaxy.

Though we can’t see all the way there in visible light, infrared observations can see through the dust in the Milky Way’s disk. This allows astronomers to observe stars swinging around the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s center, known as Sagittarius A*.

And last year, astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope — an array of synchronized radio telescopes spread across the globe — were able to image the shadow of the black hole itself.