Is there really a black hole in the centre of the Milky Way?
Yes. The data in hand seem to indicate very clearly that a very dense point mass containing several million times the mass of the Sun is located in the core of the Milky Way. The only logical candidate is a black hole, because an equivalent number of normal stars crowded together into a solar system-sized volume of space would look very different than what we actually seem to be detecting in the core of the Milky Way in an object astronomers call Sagittarius A*. back to top 15) Is it true that there is a huge black hole that has swallowed thousands of planets. It is sure that this has happened in some distant galactic core containing a supermassive black hole, although, of course, we cannot know of a particular example where this has actually happened. Supermassive black holes, like the one in Messier 87 (Plate 8), do, however, swallow stars and gas, and it is not a big stretch of the imagination that some of these stars were accompanied by planetary systems. What a dreadful fate. To b
