Galactic Center
Rotational center of the Milky Way galaxy / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Galactic Center?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
The Galactic Center is the barycenter of the Milky Way and a corresponding point on the rotational axis of the galaxy.[1][2] Its central massive object is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses, which is called Sagittarius A*,[3][4][5] a compact radio source which is almost exactly at the galactic rotational center.[clarification needed] The Galactic Center is approximately 8 kiloparsecs (26,000 ly) away from Earth[3] in the direction of the constellations Sagittarius, Ophiuchus, and Scorpius, where the Milky Way appears brightest, visually close to the Butterfly Cluster (M6) or the star Shaula, south to the Pipe Nebula.
There are around 10 million stars within one parsec of the Galactic Center, dominated by red giants, with a significant population of massive supergiants and Wolf–Rayet stars from star formation in the region around 1 million years ago. The core stars are a small part within the much wider galactic bulge.