Tracking stars near the center of the Milky Way reveals the mass and compactness of the object they orbit. The discussion explains how those trajectories provided evidence for a supermassive black hole at Sagittarius A*.
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1:49:31>> We're getting close to modernday 1998. Dynamical proof of Sagittarius A. I'm a Sagittarius. A and I'm Canadian. Sagittarius A. Okay, this was astronomer Andrea GZ at UCLA. Um, she watched she watched the black hole at the center of our Milky Way. Um, and she found definitive proof that there's definitely something there. What she did was track stars near the Milky Way and saw that them saw they were looping around in Kepleran orbits just like planets do around our sun, but there's nothing there in the middle. She calculated the mass of that thing and
1:50:11based on the trajectory of these stars, how small that thing should be and showed that it's got to be a super massive black hole. Um, it's the center of every galaxy now and it earned her the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. >> Uh, back at your second home there at UCLA, uh, with a great team over there.