Nearest supermassive black hole

Sagittarius A* is the supermassive black hole that resides in the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, some 27,000 light years away. With a mass of around four million Suns, this black hole is orbited by several massive stars and, in December 2011, astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope announced they had discovered a cloud of gas heading toward its event horizon. Containing around three times the mass of Earth, this cloud is spiralling into the black hole at around 2,350 kilometres per second and has doubled its speed in the last seven years. The gas cloud will reach the black hole in mid-2013 and its destruction will provide insights into the nature of black holes.