…what would the night sky look like? Would all those stars make it as bright as daytime? I read once that cosmologists thought that life probably would not evolve on planets near the centers of galaxies…toomuch radiation.
Anyway, how far are we away from our galaxie’s center?
I don’t know that night time from galactic center would be as bright as daytime but it’d definitely be brighter than night out here on the rim.
I too have heard that the overall radiation levels in the center would probably be too high to have allowed life (at least as we know it) form on earth if that’s where we were located (not to mention the center of our galaxy has a black hole that would have eaten the earth long ago).
The earth is about 28,000 light years from galactic center (depending on who you ask that number is sometimes given as 25,000 or 26,000 LY).
Well, assuming that we were still alive, it’d be very black, since we’d be sucked into that big black hole beastie lurking in the centre of our galaxy known as Saggitarius A*. 
If the black hole wasn’t there, the sky would be very bright - we would see stars all over the sky, rather than mainly concentrated in the Milky Way. However, the density of stars would not be great enough to ooutshine the Sun. Doing extragalctic astronomy would be very difficult, because of all the dust absorbing visible light and things like that.
The Earth is 30 000 light years from the centre of the galaxy.
Even if the radiation didn’t kill us, supernovas probably would. (They may be responsible for mass extinctions here on earth, too. There are several massive stars in Orion that could go at any moment, and we’d be toast.)
The central black hole wouldn’t be a problem, Angua, unless you foolishly wandered very close to it. You can orbit a BH just as you would orbit a star.
The question about the night sky is an interesting one. I hope a real expert comes along to answer it more precisely.
For comparison the radius of the galaxy is about 50,000 lyrs.
FriendRob, Angua is an expert on astronomy as she is an astronomer by profession. Though your right about the black hole, our galactic nucleus isn’t an active one as it isn’t taking in much material at the moment, but still it COULD suck us in if we we’re not in a stable orbit around it.
At the moment we can’t observe the galactic bulge very well at the centre of our galaxy due to the dust which Angua mentions, so if we were in the bulge I’d hate to think what our view of the extragaltic universe would look like.
From what I have read, there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. So, if Earth were at the center of our galaxy, we would be in that black hole and long dead.
I think cosmologists suspect that all galaxies have black holes at their centers.
It would depend on the radius at which you were orbiting. Within a certain radius, all orbits would be unstable, and there would be no chance of surviving. If we were able to orbit Sag A* at the radius we orbit the Sun, we may well be OK. However, orbiting a black hole won’t do very much in terms of getting useful radiation, such as light to you, and so the chances of life having developed would be about nil.
Now, lets hypothesis that our planet has suddenly, with no damage, been transported to the centre of the galaxy…
Currently, from our present position in one of the spiral arms, we see a concentrated thin band of stars known as the Milky Way - this is actually the galactic disk that we are seeing. If we were in the centre of the galaxy, i.e. in the physical centre of the galaxy, we would be embedded in the disk. Therefore, instead of the thin band of stars we see now, we would see the same concentration of stars, but spread over the full 4pi steradians of the sky.
Hope this is a more precise answer. I only have a degree in physics and am doing my PhD in astrophysics, so I probably don’t count as a “real expert”.
This thread is starting to sound like the Galaxy Song from Meaning of Life
Firstly, thank you for my defence. 
Secondly, if we were in the bulge, we’d be screwed when it comes to extragalactic astronomy. X-rays, gamma rays, light, microwaves are absorbed by dust, and so we would not be able to observe in these wavebands. In the near infra-red, the sky would glow, very very brightly, since dust glows in the infra red. We would be able to do some radio observations as well, but would be seriously limited by the state the black hole was in. If it was, as it is now, in a quiescent phase, the background radio interference would be high, but we would still be able to do some radio astronomy. If however, the black hole was in an active phase, we would again, be screwed, since the black hole would be emitting a lot of radiation in the radio waveband which would not only make it very difficult for us to do astronomy, but would probably mess up our communication systems, and practically everything else as well.
Angua that’s not really fair. How was anyone to know you’re working on a PhD in astrophysics, aside from checking your profile?
From my calculations using the Scwarzchild solution (though of course the galactic centre black hole won’t be a Scwarzchild solution) and taking the mass of the black hole as 2.6 million solar masses, the last stable orbit around Sag. A* (the photonsphere) is about 1.15e+11 m (though this isn’t realistically a stable orbit for the Earth).
Firstly, thank you for my defence.
Secondly, if we were in the bulge, we’d be screwed when it comes to extragalactic astronomy. X-rays, gamma rays, light, microwaves are absorbed by dust, and so we would not be able to observe in these wavebands. In the near infra-red, the sky would glow, very very brightly, since dust glows in the infra red. We would be able to do some radio observations as well, but would be seriously limited by the state the black hole was in. If it was, as it is now, in a quiescent phase, the background radio interference would be high, but we would still be able to do some radio astronomy. If however, the black hole was in an active phase, we would again, be screwed, since the black hole would be emitting a lot of radiation in the radio waveband which would not only make it very difficult for us to do astronomy, but would probably mess up our communication systems, and practically everything else as well.
Grey - I talk about it often enough.
Do we know that the dust is uniform about the core? Given a previously active BH with jets would the dust not be thinner at the “poles” of the core region?
Zooming
in on the
center of the
Milky Way.
The star nearest the black hole at the center, S2, is going to get ripped apart one of these days, and release all sorts of nasty radiations. Conditions at the Milky Way’s core are not conducive to a long lifespan in carbon based life-forms.
Compared to most of us nebishes on these Boards, that elevates you to near god-like status! 
Isaac Asimov wrote a story/novella called ‘Nightfall’. It involved a planet with multiple suns so there was no darkness except, by a certain conjunction with a dark planet (IIRC), every 50,000 (?) years. The planet was closer to the galactic center so there were lots more stars when they did come out. The story line involved the person predicting the impending problem, with evidence of civilization’s collapse every 50,000 years, and the chaos that did ensue when Nightfall occurred.
Without examining the feasibility of orbital dynamics, viable habitat with multiple suns, etc., it is a good read. The OP, wondering what the sky would be like, made me think of the story even though I haven’t read it for decades.
Hmmm… tides from a supermassive black hole (SMBH) are not as bad as from a stellar mass BH. That’s because the Schwarzschild radius is much larger, so the difference in distance between, say, your head and your feet, is relatively small. I would need to do the calculation to see if a star would get ripped apart by the SMBH in the Milky Way.
BTW, the latest paper I read (Ghez et al. on astroph) has the SMBH weighing in at about 4 million solar masses (+/- 0.3). This should be fairly accurate, based on the stellar orbits.
Strictly speaking, in GR, there are no stable closed orbits. Any orbiting body is losing energy and angular momentum to gravitational waves, and will eventually spiral in. But there are orbits which’ll last an awfully long time, and we could suppose that our hypothetical planet and the star it’s orbiting are in such an orbit around the center.
And there’s plenty of room at the core to not run into the black hole. The central black hole is about a millionth of a lightyear in radius; an orbit at, say, a hundred times the Schwartzschild radius would for all practical purposes be stable. But on Galactic scales, it’s pretty safe to say that one ten thousandth of a light year from the center is “in the center of the Galaxy”.
What do you mean by this, Angua? Even if it’s closer than the sun (which I see no reason to assume), it won’t fill more than half the sky, and you could still get light from the rest of the sky. And if it’s further away than the planet’s sun, then there wouldn’t be any problem at all.
This is only true if you’re talking about at the event horizon of each of the two black holes. If you’re 1AU from a mass, the tidal force will be proportional to the mass. So a 4 MM[sub]SUN[/sub] BH at 1AU will have 4 million times the tidal force of the sun at 1AU, or about 1.8 million times the tidal force of the Moon on the Earth. I don’t know if that’s enough to rip Earth apart, but it would probably make living there a pain.
Now, if the Earth were orbiting a 4 million solar mass object at a distance of 1AU, a year would be about four hours, which could get kind of rough. If we moved Earth out to 160 AUs, the year would be more like the 360 days that we’re used to. At this distance, the tides are not a problem.