Black holes suck

Researchers recently released results from 16 years of observations of stars at the very center of the Milky Way some 27,000 light-years away. They mapped the orbits of about 30 stars in a 3 light-year region (for scale, there are no stars within 3 light-years of the sun--the nearest is about 4 light-years away). The orbits and Kepler's Third Law allowed them to precisely measure the mass of the black hole--4 million times the mass of the sun, which, if my Schwarzchild math is right, gives it a diameter some 20 times bigger than the sun. Meaning that, if this black hole were the distance of the sun from us, it would be about as big as your fist held at arms length. If you could see it, which you couldn't. And we would not be happy.

Anyway, here's a cool video not showing the black hole at the center of the galaxy:

http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2008/video/vid-46e-08_P_QTP.mov