A monster Black hole can set off huge gas explosions at the center of our galaxy – and now astronomers think they’ve pinpointed where this superheated gas spills into the Milky Way.
The newly discovered feature, which acts like a giant exhaust vent, is a bright region of X-ray energy that is nearly 700 light-years from the galaxy’s supermassive black hole, but is associated with it a long “chimney” of superheated gas.
According to new research This burst of X-rays, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, is the result of hot gas powered by black holes traveling through the chimney and colliding with cooler gas in the surrounding environment at more than 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h), which sending huge shock waves rippling through the galaxy.
The discovery could unlock secrets about a supermassive black hole’s eating habits — and help reveal the true nature of some the most mysterious objects lurking at the galactic center.
“Astrophysicists have long been interested in the movement of material and energy from the center of the Milky Way and its black hole to understand what happens in our cosmic backyard and how galaxies form and evolve,” lead author of the study. Scott Mackeyan astrophysicist from the University of Chicago, said va declaration. “We are really excited to have found this new piece of the puzzle.”
A black hole belches
The The supermassive black hole of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is about 4 million times more massive than the Sun. It sits in the dense, chaotic center of our galaxy, constantly gobbling up unlucky stars, gas clouds, and other matter that gets too close to the event horizon—the point beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.
But the infalling matter does not always end up in the maw of our black hole. Sometimes matter is channeled by the powerful magnetic field into the jets that spew from the black hole at high speed. In 2019, astronomers spotted evidence of our black hole’s chaotic eating habits when they discovered two huge chimneys — one towering above Sgr A* and the other sinking below — spewing hot gas from the galactic center for hundreds of light-years in each direction.
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This discovery prompted the authors of the new study to further investigate the region. They used data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which is designed to detect extremely hot gases.
“We suspected that the magnetic fields acted like the walls of a chimney, and that hot gas passed through them like smoke,” Mackey said. “We have now discovered an exhaust hole near the top of the chimney.
Chandra observations have shown that there is this huge vent of bright X-rays near the top of the black hole’s bottom chimney, where hot and cold gas are constantly colliding. It is not clear how often Sgr A* spews gas to fill this region, but previous X-ray studies of the region he found the evidence large eruptions that occur roughly every 100 years.
If so, this system of black hole vents and chimneys may be the source of some of the most mysterious objects in our galaxy – the gargantuan. Fermi bubbles and eROSITA bubbles, which overlap each other as they straddle the center of the galaxy like a giant, invisible hourglass. Filled with high-energy gamma rays and X-rays, these mysterious bubbles stretch roughly 25,000 light-years above and below our galaxy’s central black hole—taking up about half the width of the Milky Way when measured together.
Astronomers aren’t sure where these bubbles came from, but they’ve long suspected that powerful energetic outbursts from Sgr A* may be to blame. The newly discovered black hole vent adds further fuel to this theory, drawing a relatively straight line from the black hole to the base of the bubbles, with a steady river of hot gas in between.
“The chimneys could thus be the conduits through which sources in the galactic center provided energy and particles to power the Fermi and eRosita bubbles,” the authors wrote in their study.
The team said the biggest remaining question is whether the bubbles were filled in a single, huge black hole explosion a long time ago, or a series of smaller explosions that occurred periodically over millions of years. Further study of both the galactic center and the hungry monster that lurks there could help solve this cosmic mystery.