Q& A: Black Holes

Q:
Who is involved with the analysis of the black hole at the center of our galaxy? Who will be in charge of naming this object?

A:
Radio astronomers Bruce Balick and Robert Brown found a strong source of radio waves in the direction of the galactic center in the early 1970s. They called it Sagittarius A*, to distinguish it from a nearby source called Sagittarius A. In the early 1980's, a team led by Charles Townes of UC Berkely used infrared telescopes to obtain evidence for a 3 million solar mass black hole, from the motion of gas clouds. In the 1996, a team led by Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute in Garching, Germany used improved Infrared detectors on an optical telescope in Chile to strengthen the case, as did a group led by UCLA's Andrea Ghez. See
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/00_releases/press_011400gc.html and Science 267, 65, and 68 and 85 (7 Jan 2000 issue), which can be found online at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol287/issue5450/