If a massive black hole lies at the heart of our Galaxy, its gravity should distort, or 'lense', the light from stars that lie behind it, say two astronomers in the US. This effect would be detectable by a future generation of infrared and radio telescopes.
The centre of the Galaxy is about 27 000 light years from Earth. Concentrated in a volume only a few light years across is an amount of material with several million times the mass of the Sun. No one knows what makes up this mass.
The centre of the Galaxy is marked by a peculiar source of radio waves known as Sagittarius A*, which may be a massive black hole containing millions of solar masses. Such a black hole would account for most of the mass at the galactic centre. The other possibility is that Sagittarius A* is less massive and that a dense ...
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