Sagittarius A*
Black hole
The supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, found by tracking the orbits of stars swinging around an unseen mass.
Nothing to see here, and that is the fact
Our note on this object, in English:
A black hole gives off no light of its own. This is a direction on the sky rather than a sight: the object is catalogued as an X-ray source, not an optical one, so there is nothing here to see through any telescope.Source: SIMBAD otype_txt 'X' (X-ray source) for NAME Sgr A*, read 2026-08-02Can you see it tonight?
Where are you?
To work out whether you can see this tonight, we need to know roughly where you are looking from. Your position stays in your browser: it is never sent to us, never stored and never shared.
Without it, everything else on this page still holds: what this object is, where it sits on the sky, and where every fact came from.
What it looks like
A photograph of this patch of sky, taken by a telescope on the ground. Sagittarius A* gives off no visible light, so it is not in the picture. What you can see is the crowded field of stars at the centre of our galaxy, and the black hole lies at the middle of the frame.
Brightness adjusted so faint detail shows. Every picture here is a rendering of the survey's measurements rather than a measurement itself, and this is the same setting for all of them.
- Position
- 266.41682, -29.00782Source: 2011AJ....142...35P
- Constellation
- SagittariusWorked out by us
Catalogue designations
Sgr A*
Source: SIMBAD main_id, read 2026-08-02