Recent advances have revealed significant new details about the Milky Way’s central black hole, Sagittarius A*. Artificial intelligence, leveraging over 12 million simulations, shows that Sagittarius A* is spinning at nearly its maximum possible speed. This challenges prior black hole models by indicating that the emission is dominated by hot electrons in the accretion disk, rather than jets as previously believed[3].
Additionally, new research proposes that Sagittarius A* may have once had an intermediate-mass black hole companion, which merged with it about 10 million years ago following the Milky Way’s merger with the Gaia–Sausage–Enceladus dwarf galaxy. This event could explain the current hypervelocity star population and the detected motion of Sagittarius A* itself[2].
Astronomers continue to discover multiple active supermassive black holes in interacting galaxy systems, and these findings inform our understanding of future black hole mergers within the Milky Way and other galaxies, with missions like LISA aiming to detect gravitational waves from such events[4].