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Zoom all the way into the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy

Just in case you wanted to feel completely tiny and insignificant today.

Mark Serrels Editorial Director
Mark Serrels is an award-winning Senior Editorial Director focused on all things culture. He covers TV, movies, anime, video games and whatever weird things are happening on the internet. He especially likes to write about the hardships of being a parent in the age of memes, Minecraft and Fortnite. Definitely don't follow him on Twitter.
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Mark Serrels

Last week, the European Southern Observatory confirmed something scientists have long suspected: Sagittarius A*, an astronomical radio source at the centre of our galaxy, is actually a supermassive black hole.

To prove this, they needed to observe objects travelling close to Sagittarius A*. When a star called S2 orbited deep into Sagittarius A*'s gravity well, a group of scientists from multiple European institutions observed three flares travelling at 30 percent the speed of light.

Now the European Southern Observatory has released a brilliant recreation of that sight as it occurred.

From the YouTube description:

This video starts with a wide view of the Milky Way and then zooms into a visualization of data from simulations of orbital motions of gas swirling around at about 30% of the speed of light on a circular orbit around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.

The scale of the video is absolutely incredible. Very cool stuff indeed.