Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a black hole. If this is news to you, there is no need to go hide under a rock. It turns out our black hole is not the biggest by far, and it doesn't spew out a lot of excess energy that falls into it. Even so, it is ours, and we can be glad that we have one of our very own even if it isn't the biggest one on the block. In case you are interested in seeing it’s baleful look in a picture, I’ve got bad news for you; it is invisible. No light can bounce off it. You are probably wondering how the scientists found it. Well, they knew that black holes are in the center of galaxies, so the crafty lab coats used invisible light to find our center because there is too much gas there for much there to be visible to us. The scientists noticed that the speed of stars speeds up around a certain point and posited the existence of a highly-dense black hole.
The full essay is at "Political Black Holes."
