Is there a massive black hole at the galactic center?

During the past 10 years an hypothesis about the presence of a massive black hole at the center of our Galaxy (Lynden-Bell, 1969) has been an object of many exciting speculations. This hypothesis is based, firstly, on attempts to explain the nature of the “point radio source” at the galactic center (as well as a presumed much more powerful activity of the galactic nucleus in the remote past), and, secondly, on the opinion that the conditions in the course of dynamical evolution of galactic nuclei are favorable for the formation of massive black holes. However, both these approaches did not succeed in predicting with any confidence the black hole mass at the center of the Galaxy. The estimates available are based on indirect arguments and range from 107-1011 M⊙ (Novikov and Thorne, 1973) to 104 M⊙ (Shklovskii, 1976). A recent dynamical approach using NeII infrared observations of the galactic center (Wollman et al., 1977) has indicated that the black hole mass does not exceed 5×106 M⊙ (Oort, 1977), although this value may well be due to a very dense star cluster whose brightest members only are seen in the infrared.