Is there really a black hole at the center of our galaxy?

Question

And if their is, what purpose does it have?

If the sun is going to the galactic center, would it get swallowed by the black hole?

But isn't the sun going to the galactic center?

Which is where the black hole is.

Answer 1

The latest theories indicate that there is a Supermassive Black Hole in the center of the Milky Way. For now most scientist will only venture that there is a huge object that is named Sagitarius A* that weighs aproximately 3.7 million solar masses in an area close to the size of our solar system. The point is moot anyhow because if it not a black hole it will be soon (few houndred years which is super-fast in astonomical time)

The sun is indeed free falling towards the center of the galaxy the same way the Earth is free falling towards the sun so it'll take it's sweet time.

Answer 2

If a black hole could exist it would eventually accrete all the matter in the universe and sit for eternity doing nothing
A black hole does not inhabit the galactic center.
The engine the drives the galactic center is some sort of neutron star activity on a massive scale.
All matter in the galaxy is migrating to the center and it is being processed such that it resembles a reversal of the conditions that occurred when the universe began.
A galaxy is the end stage in the evolution of the universe and it would exhibit a recessional red shift in it's spectrum no matter what side it was viewed from.

Answer 3

Why do people think that things always have to have a purpose? Some things just are. If they have purpose, then we are a bit of a ways off to learning with definitive certainty, what that purpose would be.

Virtually all galaxies have a black hole at their center. Hubble and radio telescopes have proven that.

Why would you think that the Sun is headed for the galactic center? Every scientific journal I have read gives no indication that our ultimate fate is to be gobbled by our Milky Way core.

But, you said "IF" -- Big "if".

If it were headed for the center, then it would only make the most common sense that it and we would get swallowed by the black hole. I hope your happy now.

Answer 4

There really is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. Although a black hole can not be seen directly, it is known by the effects it has on the stars orbiting its mass. By calculating their orbit times it has been found that the black hole masses 2 million times our sun's mass.

Our sun is in a stable orbit far from the center of the galaxy so you don't have to worry about us being swallowed by the black hole unless something like another sun comes by us and knock us out of orbit. There are no known stars near us that would cause this.

Answer 5

There is. It's an object known as Sagittarius-A, you can find it right between the head of the Scorpion and Sagittarius. The sun orbits the galactic center every 250 million years, from a distance of about 25,000 light-years, so the sun will not be gobbled up by the black hole.

The black hole has a mass of tens of millions of suns, its gravity attracts the billions of stars in the spiral arms of the galaxy, which orbit around it.

Answer 6

No it is not going to fall into the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, for the same reason the Earth doesn't get swallowed by the Sun. It orbits at a safe distance where it can drift through space forever.

Only objects near the black hole get sucked in and that only happens because objects collide with each other as they spin faster and faster towards the black hole.

The black hole at the centre of our galaxy makes our galaxy sprial shaped but it does little else other than that. The arms of the spiral will rotate for billions of years.

Hope this exlpains what you want to know.

Answer 7

The center of out Universe Is The Sun.

Answer 8

No there is not a black hole at the center of the galaxy! The Man won't let a black man be in the center of anything but a line-up!

Answer 9

yes, but no worries, the sun will expand and melt the Earth long before any possibility of it being swallowed by a black hole.

Answer 10

Black holes might not exist – or at least not as scientists have imagined, cloaked by an impenetrable "event horizon". A controversial new calculation could abolish the horizon, and so solve a troubling paradox in physics.
The event horizon is supposed to mark a boundary beyond which nothing can escape a black hole's gravity. According to the general theory of relativity, even light is trapped inside the horizon, and no information about what fell into the hole can ever escape. Information seems to have fallen out of the universe.
That contradicts the equations of quantum mechanics, which always preserve information. How to resolve this conflict?
One possibility researchers have proposed in the past is that the information does leak back out again slowly. It may be encoded in a hypothetical flow of particles called Hawking radiation, which is thought to result from the black holes' event horizons messing with the quantum froth that is ever-present in space.
But other researchers argue the information may never have been cut off in the first place. Tanmay Vachaspati and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, US, have tried to calculate what happens as a black hole is forming. Using an unusual mathematical approach called the functional Schrodinger equation, they follow a sphere of stuff as it collapses inwards, and predict what a distant observer would see.
They find that the gravity of the collapsing mass starts to disrupt the quantum vacuum, generating what they call "pre-Hawking" radiation. Losing that radiation reduces the total mass-energy of the object – so that it never gets dense enough to form an event horizon and a true black hole. "There are no such things", Vachaspati told New Scientist. "There are only stars going toward being a black hole but not getting there."
Dark and denseThese so-called "black stars" would look very much like black holes, says Vachaswati. From the point of view of a distant observer, gravity distorts the apparent flow of time so that matter falling inwards slows down. As it gets close to where the horizon would be, the matter fades, its light stretched to such long wavelengths by the dark object's gravity that it would be nearly impossible to detect.
But because the pre-Hawking radiation prevents the formation of a black hole with a true event horizon, the matter never quite fades entirely. As nothing is cut off from the rest of the universe, there is no information paradox.
The idea faces firm opposition from other theoretical physicists, however. "I strongly disagree," says Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "The process he describes can in no way produce enough radiation to make a black hole disappear as quickly as he is suggesting." The horizon forms long before the hole can evaporate, 't Hooft told New Scientist.
Lab testSteve Giddings of the University of California in Santa Barbara, US, is also sceptical. "Well-understood findings apparently conflict with their picture," he told New Scientist. "To my knowledge, there hasn't been an attempt to understand how they are getting results that differ from these calculations, which would be an important step to understanding if this is a solid result."
There could be a way to test the new theory. The Large Hadron Collider being constructed at CERN in Geneva might just be capable of making microscopic black holes – or, if Vachaspati is right, black stars. Unlike the large, long-lived black holes in space, these microscopic objects would evaporate fast. The spread of energies in their radiation might reveal whether or not an event horizon forms.
Alternatively, colliding black stars in space might reveal themselves, as Vachaspati says they would churn out not only gravitational waves (like colliding black holes) but also gamma rays. He suggests that they could be responsible for some of the gamma-ray bursts seen by astronomers.