NASA scientists reveal that the Supermassive Black Hole in Our Milky Way has a “leak”
The black hole, called Sagittarius A*, periodically emits a ‘blowtorch-like jet’ out into space through this leak, perhaps once every several thousand years, NASA says.
It’s thought the black hole ‘burps out’ this jet every time it swallows something hefty like a gas cloud, and the jet then hits a huge hydrogen cloud.
Sagittarius A* is at the galactic centre of our Milky Way and has a mass that’s 4.1 million times that of our Sun.
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The black hole, called Sagittarius A*, periodically emits a ‘blowtorch-like jet’ out into space through this leak, perhaps once every several thousand years, NASA says (artist’s impression)
Gerald Cecil of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill led this new research. Cecil gathered multiwavelength observations with a range of telescopes and arranged them ‘like an jigsaw puzzle.
Data was taken from two of NASA’s telescopes – Hubble and Chandra – as well as from ALMA radio telescopes in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico.
Hubble has not yet photographed the jet, so it calls it a “phantom plane”.
Hubble helped to find evidence it is pushing into a large hydrogen cloud, then splashing like “the narrow stream of water from a hose pointed into a heap of sand”.
NASA reported that “Astronomers have detected a glowing cloud near the blackhole using the Hubble space telescope.”
“The cloud is being struck by narrow columnated jets of material that were blasted from the black hole only 2,000 years ago. This is the interpretation.
“This further proves that the black hole with its mass of 4.1million Suns isn’t a sleeping giant, but a constantly hiccuping star and gas cloud falling into it, this is yet another proof.
Due to their intense gravitational pull, black holes draw material such as gas, plasma, dust and other particles into a swirling, orbiting disc called an ‘accretion disk’.
The black hole is believed to ‘burp out’ the jet whenever it swallows something heavy like a gas cloud. After that, the jet hits a massive hydrogen cloud.
A schematic based on multiwavelength observations of a suspected jet from Sagittarius A*. Main view: Two huge plasma bubbles glowing in X-rays, gamma and gamma radiations are visible at the galaxy’s edge. These bubbles are evidence that the black hole exploded about 2,000,000 years ago. Hubble has captured the glow of hydrogen in the vicinity of the black hole after astronomers probed deep into its core. This cloud is being struck by a narrow columnated jet made of material that came out of the black holes 2,000 years ago.
NASA says that here material is being pulled into outflowing jets rather than moving toward the black hole.
The agency describes the jets as narrow ‘searchlight beams’ that are accompanied by a flood of deadly ionising radiation.
The jet collides with the hydrogen cloud and the outflow becomes octopus-like tendrils that follow a path out of the galaxy.
Alex Wagner from Tsukuba University, Japan co-authored the article.
“The jet is a divergence from a pencil beam to tendrils like an octopus.
Prof. Cecil worked with colleagues to create supercomputer models that simulate jet outflows on a Milky Way disk. These simulations reproduced the observed results.
He said, “Like archaeology you dig and dig until you find older and more artifacts, and finally you discover remnants of an ancient civilisation.”
When the jet passes through the hydrogen gas it encounters cosmic material. It creates expanding bubbles which can reach at most 500 light year.
The streams continue to percolate out of the Milky Way’s dense gas disk into the galactic halo – the large and relatively dust-free spherical region surrounding a spiral galaxy such as our own.
Hubble (pictured) orbits Earth at a speed of about 17,000mph (27,300kph) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles in altitude
Wagner said that ‘Our central dark hole clearly increased in luminosity at minimum 1,000,000-fold over the last one million years’.
“That is enough to allow a jet of its size to reach the galactic halo.”
There has already been evidence of jets coming from Sagittarius A* – back in 2013, X-rays detected by Chandra and radio waves detected by VLA revealed a evidence for a ‘stubby’ southern jet near the black hole.
Hubble, as well as other telescopes, have previously observed evidence of the Milky Way’s black holes having an outburst approximately 2-4 million years ago.
The event created a pair of enormous bubbles that glowed in the gamma-rays. This was first detected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (NASA).
The new study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.