There is a leak in the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and it is blowing out blowtorch-like jets several thousand years old. The Hubble Space Telescope has found circumstantial evidence that the jet is still pushing weakly into a giant hydrogen cloud and then splashing down.
Hubble hasn’t photographed the event yet, but the latest observations suggest that the black hole that dominates the center of our galaxy is not asleep, instead, it wakes up periodically and when stars and gas Clouds fall in it. The black holes pull some of the material into the rotating, orbiting accretion disk, where some of the falling material is swept away into outflow jets collected by the black hole’s powerful magnetic fields, NASA said.
In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers documented how Black hole ejects mini-jets every time something heavy is swallowed, like a gas cloud. “The central black hole is dynamically variable and is currently driven down,” said the paper’s lead author, Gerald Cecil of the University of North Carolina.
finding the first evidence
The first evidence of such a jet emanating from a black hole was observed in 2013 by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, followed by radio waves detected by the Jansky Very Large Array Telescope in Socorro. Based on those observations, Cecil and his team looked at archival data of molecules such as methyl alcohol and carbon monosulfide from the ALMA Observatory in Chile, which has been able to see through the dust curtain between us and the galactic core.
The observatory revealed an elongated, narrow linear feature in the molecular gas that can be traced back at least 15 light-years to the black hole. The team then got infrared images from Hubble showing a glowing, inflating bubble of hot gas aligned with the jet at a distance of at least 35 light-years from the black hole. He suggested that the black hole jet inflated the bubble and plunged it.
As it flies through the gas, the jet collides with the material and is bent with multiple currents. “The streams emanated from the galaxy’s dense gas disk. The jet turns from a pencil beam into an octopus-like tendril. This outflow creates a series of bubbles extending at least 500 light-years. This large is at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. “The structure of soap bubbles has been mapped at different wavelengths by other telescopes,” said co-author Alex Wagner of the study.
After this the researchers ran the supercomputer model of Jet outflow in a simulated galaxy disk, which reproduces the comments. “Our central black hole has apparently increased in brightness by at least 1 million times over the past million years. That’s enough for a jet to punch into the galactic halo,” Wagner said.
NASA said that previous observations of black holes in our galaxy showed that they exploded about 2-4 million years ago, which are energetic enough to form a giant pair of giant bubbles above our galaxy that emit gamma-rays. I shine.
What is the black hole at the center of our galaxy?
The black hole at the center of our galaxy has a mass of 4.1 million suns. It is a celestial body whose gravitational pull is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from it.
Graphic: NASA
So far, two main classes of black holes have been widely observed.
Stellar-mass black holes that are three to dozens of times the mass of the Sun are scattered throughout our Milky Way galaxy, while supermassive monsters with masses of 100,000 to billions of solar masses are found in the centers of most large galaxies. black hole at the center of Our galaxy is a supermassive black hole.
According to NASA, a stellar-mass black hole forms when a star with a mass of more than 20 solar masses exhausts the nuclear fuel in its core and collapses under its own weight, while the supermassive black hole’s origin is completely destroyed. remains to be understood. However, we do know that they have been present since the earliest days of the galaxy’s lifetime. Once born, black holes can accrete the matter that falls into them, including gas stripped from neighboring stars and even other black holes.