The monster black hole The center of our Milky Way can unleash huge, gaseous explosions – and now astronomers think they’ve found the exact spot where that superheated gas flows into the Milky Way.
Acting as a giant exhaust vent, the newly discovered feature is a bright region of X-ray energy located nearly 700 light-years away from the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, but connected to it by a long “chimney” of super hot gas.
According to new research This X-ray burst, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, is the result of hot, black-hole-powered gas rushing down the chimney and colliding with cooler gas nearby at speeds of more than 2 million miles per hour, sending huge shock waves rippling through the Milky Way.
The discovery could unlock secrets about the supermassive black hole’s eating habits – and the true nature of some of these the most mysterious objects lurking in the galactic center.
“Astrophysicists have long been interested in the motion of material and energy from the center of the Milky Way and its black hole, both to understand what’s happening in our cosmic backyard and how galaxies form and evolve,” said the study’s lead author. Scott Mackeyan astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, said in a rack. “We are very excited to find this new piece of the puzzle.”
Black hole burping
The The Milky Way’s supermassive black holeSagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is about 4 million times more massive than the Sun. It sits at the dense, chaotic center of our galaxy, constantly gobbling up hapless stars, gas clouds and other matter that gets too close to its event horizon — the point where nothing, not even light, can escape.
But non-falling matter doesn’t always end up in the maw of our black hole. Sometimes matter is channeled by powerful people magnetic fields in jets shooting out of the black hole at high speed. In 2019, astronomers discovered evidence of our black hole’s messy eating habits when they spotted two massive chimneys—one towering above Sgr A*, the other sloping downward—siphoning hot gas hundreds of light-years in each direction from the galactic center.
Related: ‘Immortal’ stars at the center of the Milky Way may have found an endless source of energy, research suggests
This discovery prompted the authors of the new study to investigate the region further. To do this, they used data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which is designed to detect extremely hot gases.
“We suspected that magnetic fields act as the walls of the chimney and that hot gas flows through them as smoke,” Mackey said. “Now we’ve discovered an exhaust vent at the top of the chimney.”
The Chandra observations revealed that near the top of the black hole’s lower chimney there is a huge opening of bright X-rays, where hot and cool gas are constantly colliding. It is unclear how often Sgr A* spews gas to fill this region, but previous X-ray studies of the region have hinted at it. evidence found of major eruptions that occur approximately every 100 years.
If so, this black hole vent-and-chimney system could be the source of some of the most mysterious objects in our galaxy: the giant Fermi bubbles And eROSITA bubbles, which overlap as they sit like a giant, invisible hourglass over the center of the Milky Way. These mysterious bubbles, filled with high-energy gamma rays and X-rays, extend roughly 25,000 light-years above and below our galaxy’s central black hole – together measured about half the width of the Milky Way.
Astronomers aren’t sure where these bubbles came from, but they have long suspected that powerful energy bursts from Sgr A* could be the cause. The newly discovered venting of the black hole adds even more fuel to this theory, by 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 therefore be the conduits through which sources in the galactic center provided the energy and particles to fuel the Fermi and eRosita bubbles,” the authors wrote in their study.
The team said the biggest remaining question is whether the bubbles were filled long ago in a single, massive outburst from a black hole, or by a series of smaller explosions that occurred regularly over millions of years. Further study of both the galactic center and the hungry monster lurking there could help solve this cosmic mystery.