The dark, heavy heart of the Milky Way

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, stretches across the night sky like a blurry ring of lights across the entire firmament. Deep inside the galaxy, hidden by dense clouds of gas and dust, stars circle around an extremely massive, dark object - a so-called "black hole" according to Einstein's theory of gravity. What does that mean exactly? And what does it have to do with us on Earth?

At this Café & Kosmos evening, astrophysicist Dr Odele Straub from the Cluster of Excellence ORIGINS and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics will talk about how black holes get into the sky, and how researchers observe something that by definition is not observable.