The Discovery of Sgr A*

The Galactic Center is an excellent laboratory for studying phenomena and physical processes that may be occurring in many other galactic nuclei. The Center of our Milky Way is by far the closest galactic nucleus, and observations with exquisite resolution and sensitivity cover 18 orders of magnitude in energy of electromagnetic radiation. Theoretical simulations have become increasingly more powerful in explaining these measurements. This review summarizes the recent progres...

The Galactic center is an ideal laboratory to study strong-field general relativistic phenomena, as the supermassive black hole Sgr A* has the biggest angular Schwarzschild radius among all black holes. This article presents three different ways of using the immediate surroundings of Sgr A* as a probe in order to either constrain its spin, or even test the very nature of this compact object.

In the past decade high resolution measurements in the infrared employing adaptive optics imaging on 10m telescopes have allowed determining the three dimensional orbits stars within ten light hours of the compact radio source at the center of the Milky Way. These observations show the presence of a three million solar mass black hole in Sagittarius A* beyond any reasonable doubt. The Galactic Center thus constitutes the best astrophysical evidence for the existence of black ...

The Galactic Center is the closest galactic nucleus that allows us to determine the multi-frequency behavior of the supermassive black hole counterpart Sagittarius A* in great detail. We put SgrA*, as a nucleus with weak activity, into the context of nearby low luminosity nuclei. Possible hints for galaxy evolution of these sources across the [NII]-based diagnostic diagram can be inferred from dependencies on the masses, excitation ratios, and radio luminosities within this d...

They are weak, they are small, and they are often overlooked, but they are numerous and an ubiquitous sign of accreting black holes: compact radio cores and jets in low-power AGN. Here I summarize our work concerning these radio cores and jets in recent years, specifically focusing on the large population of low-luminosity AGN. Special attention is also given to Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole candidate at the Galactic Center, whose radio properties are reviewed in more d...

We report the detection of the two-dimensional structure of the radio source associated with the Galactic Center black hole, Sagittarius A*, obtained from Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) observations at a wavelength of 7mm. The intrinsic source is modeled as an elliptical Gaussian with major axis size 35.4 x 12.6 R_S in position angle 95 deg East of North. This morphology can be interpreted in the context of both jet and accretion disk models for the radio emission. There is ...

Since its identification as the Galactic Center, the radio source Sagittarius A has been a target of intense research. Due to the high density of sources in the Galactic Center and differing observing techniques, the nomenclature of sources in this region has changed over the years, with sources having several names, as well as the same names being used for different sources. We review this historical evolution in the context of current and previous scientific discussions, an...

We summarize basic observational results on Sagittarius~A* obtained from the radio, infrared and X-ray domain. Infrared observations have revealed that a dusty S-cluster object (DSO/G2) passes by SgrA*, the central super-massive black hole of the Milky Way. It is still expected that this event will give rise to exceptionally intense activity in the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Based on February to September 2014 SINFONI observations. The detection of spatially compact and...

The cores of most galaxies are thought to harbour supermassive black holes, which power galactic nuclei by converting the gravitational energy of accreting matter into radiation (ref 1). Sagittarius A*, the compact source of radio, infrared and X-ray emission at the centre of the Milky Way, is the closest example of this phenomenon, with an estimated black hole mass that is 4 million times that of the Sun (refs. 2,3). A long-standing astronomical goal is to resolve structures...

Recent observations of the radio and NIR source Sgr A* reinforce the interpretation of the Galactic Center as a scaled down version of an AGN. The discovery of an elongated structure at 43 GHz and increasing evidence for the presence of an accretion disk surrounding a Black Hole lead us to assume that both, an accretion disk and a jet, are present in the Galactic Center and are physically linked. We model the radio emission of Sgr A* successfully with a Blandford & K"onigl ty...