Sagittarius A

It is located between Scorpius and Sagittarius, and is hidden from view at optical wavelengths by large clouds of cosmic dust in the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

The dust lane that obscures the Galactic Center from a vantage point around the Sun causes the Great Rift through the bright bulge of the galaxy.

It is conjectured that Sgr A East is the remnant of the explosion of a star that was gravitationally compressed as it made a close approach to the central black hole.

Sgr A West is surrounded by a massive, clumpy torus of cooler molecular gas, the Circumnuclear Disk (CND).

The most prominent of these perturbations is the Minicavity, which is interpreted as a bubble blown inside the Northern Arm by the stellar wind of a massive star, which is not clearly identified.

[10] A gas cloud, G2, passed through the Sagittarius A* region in 2014 and managed to do so without disappearing beyond the event horizon, as theorists predicted would happen.

[11][12] In September 2019, scientists found that Sagittarius A* had been consuming nearby matter at a much faster rate than usual over the previous year.