Sagittarius A*

Black holes can also have hiccups, and this phenomenon is not alien to our galaxy. Runs the black heart of the Milky Way Sagittarius A*, which is a supermassive black hole 4.1 million suns. Like other cosmic monsters that inhabit the centers of galaxies, Sagittarius A* devours all celestial bodies irresistibly close by. country gravity. Using data from the space telescope HubbleThe research team discovered something unusual flow It comes from the black hole of the Milky Way, similar to the jet of a blowtorch. When analyzing the Hubble data, scientists found that the jet is several years old since thousands of years, but it still bulges weakly into a huge cloud of hydrogen.

Reason? It’s huge effects hiccups emitted by Sagittarius A* after a slightly excessive ancient stellar feast, which shook the black hole causing this jet to escape towardsgalactic aura. This is further evidence that black holes are not sleeping monsters, but periodically change their structure as they gobble up stars and gas clouds.

Previous observations by Hubble and other telescopes have already found evidence of a powerful explosion of Sagittarius A*, which occurred 2 to 4 million years ago. The explosion was powerful enough to light up a gaseous structure about 200,000 light-years from the galactic center, called Magellanic Stream, whose gas still glows today.

The new jet of cosmic hiccups caused something similar, albeit on a smaller scale: a very hot bubble of expanding gas, possibly inflated by the jet discovered by Hubble. To better understand this complex phenomenon, scientists analyzed the galaxy from Hubble NGC 1068, whose black hole produced a very similar jet. Illustrating how black hole hiccups have effects that last for thousands, sometimes millions of years.

Top image: Composite image of X-rays, molecular gas, and hot ionized gas near the center of the galaxy. Credits: NASA, ESA, Gerald Cecil (Unc-Chapel Hill), Joseph DePasquale (STScI)