Word.ws English Dictionary

Sagittarius A*

Sagittarius A* proper noun: the central supermassive black hole of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Proper noun

Sagittarius A*

  1. The central supermassive black hole of the Milky Way Galaxy.
    • Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the Milky Way galaxy, was a harder target. It is less than one-thousandth the mass and size of the M87 hole and, therefore, evolves a thousand times faster.2022 May 12, Dennis Overbye, “The Milky Way’s Black Hole Comes to Light”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
    Synonyms:
    Sgr A*

Synonyms of Sagittarius A*

  • Sgr A*

Origin of Sagittarius A*

From being the unseen gravitational centre associated with the astronomical radio source Sagittarius A, the astrophysical radio source associated with the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. The asterisk * originally symbolized an exciting discovery, by analogy with the symbol's use to denote the excited state of atoms.

Questions about Sagittarius A*

What does Sagittarius A* mean?
Sagittarius A* means the central supermassive black hole of the Milky Way Galaxy.
What part of speech is Sagittarius A*?
Sagittarius A* is a proper noun.

Words near Sagittarius A* in the dictionary

  1. sagittaries
  2. sagittariid
  3. sagittariids
  4. Sagittario
  5. Sagittarius
  6. Sagittarius A*
  7. Sagittariuses
  8. sagittary
  9. sagittas
  10. sagittate
  11. sagittated

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Sagittarius A* (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Sagittarius A*.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sagittarius_a*. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.