Earth Closer To Supermassive Black Hole Based On The Reimagined Map Of Milky Way

Earth is closer to the Milky Way's supermassive black hole than previously thought if the new map of the galaxy Japan has presented is to go by.

Specifically, Earth's movement toward the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy just got faster by 7 kilometers per second. At the rate that it's going, Earth is now 2,000 light-years closer to the supermassive black hole, according to a proposed map from Japan's VERA project. For context, the Milky Way is about 150,000 to 200,000 light-years across and 2,000 light-years deep from Earth.

VERA stands for Very Long Baseline Interferometry Exploration of Radio Astrometry. Japan started the project in 2000, aiming to map the three-dimensional velocity and spatial structures in the Milky Way.

To be clear, the proposed map offers no indication that the Earth is being hurled toward the supermassive black hole. What the project VERA tries to provide is a better understanding of the spatial distance between the Earth and the Milky Way.

Black holes possess extremely strong gravity that not even light can escape if it gets sucked up inside of it. Meanwhile, supermassive black holes possess about a million and a billion times more mass than regular black holes. They only exist in large galaxies and in this case at the center of our Milky Way.

Because of this extremely complicated position, there is no way to view the actual position of the celestial bodies in the universe. This is where the VERA project attempts to come in. By calculating the center of the Galaxy, the project estimates that the supermassive black hole is located 25,800 light-years from Earth.

"This is closer than the official value of 27700 light-years adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1985," the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), which is behind the project VERA, explained in a press release.

"The velocity component of the map indicates that Earth is travelling at 227 km/s as it orbits around the Galactic Center. This is faster than the official value of 220 km/s," the NAOJ further explained.

Moving forward, the project will attempt to observe more spatial objects. Its focus lies on the celestial objects closest to the Milky Way's supermassive black hole.