Earth just moved closer to 2,000 light years from the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole

At the center of our galaxy there is a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A *. It has a mass about 4 million times that of our sun.

Good news! As it turns out, scientists have discovered that we are 2,000 light years closer to Sagittarius A * than we thought.

This does not mean that we are currently on a collision course with a black hole. No, this is simply the result of a more precise model of the Milky Way based on new data.

Over the past 15 years, a Japanese radio astronomy project, VERA, has collected data. Using a technique called interferometry, VERA collected data from telescopes across Japan and combined it with data from other existing projects to create what is essentially the most accurate map of the Milky Way in this day.

By locating the location and speed of about 99 specific points in our galaxy, VERA concluded that the supermassive Sagittarius A black hole, at the center of our galaxy, is actually 25,800 light years from Earth – nearly 2,000. light years longer than we previously thought.

In addition, the new model calculates that the Earth is moving faster than we thought. Older models clocked the speed of the Earth at 220 kilometers (136 miles) per second, orbiting the center of the galaxy. VERA’s new model takes us forward at 227 kilometers (141 miles) per second.

Not bad!

VERA now hopes to increase the accuracy of its model by increasing the number of points from which it collects data by expanding into EAVN (East Asia VLBI Network) and collecting data from a larger suite of radio telescopes located across Japan, Korea and China.