Back in 1971, a couple of British astronomers predicted the existence of a black hole at the center of our galaxy. And in 1974, other astronomers found it, naming it Sagittarius A*.
Since then, astronomers have discovered that a similar “supermassive black hole” sits at the center of almost every other large galaxy. In 2019, they took the first image of a supermassive black hole. Today, these exotic objects are a fundamental part of our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve.
But what of smaller astronomical bodies, like the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf satellite galaxy that is expected to collide with the Milky Way in 2.4 billion years? Nobody is quite sure whether clouds like this might also house supermassive black holes.
