at its center, Milky Way He has an old Black hole That for more than 10,000 million years devoured millions of suns. Before gas and dust flow into the crater to disappear, gamma rays and charged particles appear at nearly the speed of light.
The black hole is in a silent state, but results published last week in The Astrophysical Journal by researchers at the University of North Carolina and collaborators in Japan, Australia and India provide evidence of powerful eruptions from the past million years ago. A few thousand years.
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“The Milky Way’s central black hole increased tens of millions of times when it ingested a stream of gas a few million years ago,” said Gerald Cecil, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
This event radiated a distant plume of gas from the Milky Way still recovering from exposure to the explosion. In the new paper, the team describes finding an X-ray-tracked particle beam from this event that was still active at a low level.
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The multi-agency team led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill traced a still-active particle beam.
Science: NASA, European Space Agency, Gerald Cecil (UNC-Chapel Hill) Image processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
There is so much dust 26,000 light-years from the center of our galaxy that the SOAR telescope at UNC-Chapel Hill in Chile cannot penetrate it.
Instead, the team used Earth’s most powerful telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) high in the Chilean Andes, to penetrate the dust and track the orderly flow of alcohol and other particles from the center.
Unlike other radio and X-ray telescopes, ALMA can map gas motions, allowing the team to isolate the flow of unrelated gas.
“Along our line of sight, we find the molecular gas being pushed aside by the jet of particles that goes against the characteristic of the long X-rays,” Cecil said. “The flow is pretty weak today, but in the past, it was perfectly capable of amplifying the massive gamma-ray and X-ray bubbles that hovers 50,000 light-years above and below our galaxy’s disk.”
The team simulated the plane’s effects on the Milky Way using supercomputers at UNC-Chapel Hill and in Australia, and got an excellent match.
“We plan to extend our map along the plane’s axis that we found using ALMA and mid-infrared spectra from the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope, as well as other supercomputer simulations,” Cecil explained. “We want to determine how often and for how long the jet is turned on, and then our black hole is turned on.”
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Soon, highly magnified images by the Event Horizon Telescope may reveal the base of the jet’s jet of black hole light clocks to complement this team’s study at scales from one to 1,000 light-years away.
“Next we can uncover the history of this strange and global phenomenon, and begin to understand how a black hole affects our galaxy, the Milky Way,” said study co-author Alex Wagner, associate professor at the university’s Center for Computational Science. from Tsukuba.
science writing*
With information from UNC-Chapel Hill
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