# How many light years away is Earth from the closest outer edge of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way?

How many light years is Earth away from the closest outer edge of the supermassive black hole in Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way? I don't mean the distance to the center of the galaxy, but to the point in the black hole's circumference where it is closest to us.

• Aug 26 '14 at 6:28
• I've looked at that link but I didn't find this info there; could you point me specifically to where on the page that can be found? Aug 26 '14 at 8:48
• Copy the link, do not just click on it: the * is not included in the link, and it send to a wrong page. Aug 26 '14 at 9:01

As @Py-ser already said, there is the very clear information about that, although his link correctly is here.

As we can read there, the distance of this is around 25000 light years, with a precision of 1400 light years.

Normally, the size of most galaxies is around some ten thousands of light years. Compared to the black holes, their size (the diameter of their event horizon) is some kilometers (stellar black holes) or some astronomical units (some millions - hundred millions of kilometers).

Even the size of the event horizon of the greatest known black hole is around the size of the solar system, which is around some thousandth of light years.

You don't need to ask, "how far we are from the nearest edge of Sagittarius A*", you can simply ask "how far we are from Sagittarius A".

• +1 but according to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TON_618 the Schwarzschild radius (even horizon radius) of the most massive black holes is not about thousands of light years but about 1300 AU, which is just about one light week.
– Pere
Jul 4 '19 at 11:39