suddenly, The central black hole in the Milky Way He was starting to look less like a weirdo.
Astronomers have discovered a large, cone-shaped void in the surrounding gas Sagittarius A*a super-massive galaxy Black holewhich could solve a long-standing mystery.
All active black holes must blow winds or… Planes of material Back to space While feeding them, according to the theory. This process is how supermassive black holes form the galaxies surrounding them. But no matter how hard astronomers looked, they never saw our black hole, called Sgr A*, pushing anything outward.
New images taken by a research team led by Northwestern University now suggest that this conical tunnel through a fog of cold gas is evidence of those missing winds. It was almost literally an arrow pointing into the black hole, said Mark Gorski, who co-led the study.
“This is the first time we’ve gotten a view clean enough to see the effect of the wind,” Gorski said. statement. “We looked at the data and said, ‘Here it is. “This is the thing everyone has been looking for for 50 years.”
In fact, discovery was not so easy and simple. Only after the team overlaid their image with data from NASAChandra’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is beginning to make sense of their observations. They said that gave them confidence that the strange cone was not just a photographic artifact.
“When you find something that no one has ever seen before, the first thought that runs through your mind is not ‘Oh my God, we’ve made a discovery,'” co-author Elena Morchikova said in a statement. “Oh my God, what’s wrong with my analysis?”
Speed of light mashable
Astronomers combined radio and X-ray data from the ALMA and Chandra-X telescopes to study the cone-shaped void near the central black hole in the Milky Way.
Image source: NASA/CXC/Northwestern/M. Gorski/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO/ALMA/K. Arcand and B. Edmunds
Scientists believe Almost all large galaxies They have a supermassive black hole at their core. These are areas millions to billions of times larger than Earth sun. In fact, so much mass is packed into these small spaces that gravity becomes strong enough to prevent anything from escaping, including light.
Not only do these black holes sit around waiting for gas, dust, and stars to fall in, they influence how their galaxies evolve around them by sucking in material and also blowing out material that approaches their boundaries. It’s called the event horizon – Back off.
By taking high precision notes with Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array In Chile, over the course of about five years, the team was able to map the cold gas near the black hole in unprecedented detail. According to the researchers, this ALMA image is 100 times deeper and 80 times clearer than previous maps.
The cone extends from one to three Light year Away from the black hole. The simplest explanation after careful study, according to The team’s findings Published in Astrophysical Journal Lettersis that a fast, energetic stream of hot material shot out from the black hole’s region, pushing cold gas on its way out of the way.
The ALMA radio telescopes in Chile spent five years observing the central region of the Milky Way to create high-resolution maps of the surrounding cold gas.
Credit: alma/s. Longmore et al. /ESO/Dr. Minetti et al.
The team determined that creating the cone gap would require more energy than all the stars in that region could provide. Researchers estimate that the winds may have been blowing 20,000 years or more ago.
Based on the image, the direction of Sagittarius A*’s winds appears slanted and somewhat uneven, suggesting that it may be weakened and distorted by the surrounding gas as it moves.
How this feature escaped notice by previous researchers is not very surprising, the researchers said. In order to see in The center of our galaxyAstronomers have to look through the plane of the Milky Way, which is dense with gas, dust and ionized structures. Shooter A* may also be in a quieter state, making detection of distant activity more difficult.
Some scientists have previously suggested that the lack of winds or jets might mean that Sgr A* is an exotic black hole, an exotic black hole among hundreds of billions of others like it. If anything, Morchikova is now convinced of the opposite.
“It shows that our black hole is not unique, and our place in the universe is not unique,” she said.
