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dungisdangit t1_jdf8py5 wrote

You're on a planet orbiting Sagittarius A btw

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RedshiftWarp t1_jdfda8r wrote

It is bizarre to imagine the geometry of that gravity-well extending all the way out here pockmarked with tiny ones from stars and clusters.

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pmMeAllofIt t1_jdfkd6g wrote

It's not really.Were orbiting the center of mass of the whole galaxy, Sagittarius A* just happens to be near there, but if it was to disappear not much would happen out this far.

Sagittarius A* is about 4 million solar masses, but there's possibly about 65 billion solar masses in other stars, then about a trillion solar masses or more in dark matter. We orbit around the center of mass of all of it, and so does the black hole which only makes up about 0.0004% of the total mass(though it could be located right at the barycenter?idk).

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s1ngular1ty2 t1_jdfkvuz wrote

Not really. Our solar system is not orbiting the black hole. We are orbiting the center of mass of the galaxy, and it's dark matter, not the black hole. The black hole is insignificant as far as orbits of the galaxy are concerned. The dark matter of the galaxy dictates the orbits because it is 5x more massive than all the other matter combined.

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