The black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A * and which is 4.1 million times the mass of our Sun, periodically emits a ‘torch-like jet’ into space through this leak, according to the POT.
The new study, led by Gerald Cecil of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brought together multi-wavelength observations from a variety of telescopes “like a puzzle.” The data was taken from two of NASA’s telescopes, Hubble and Chandra, as well as ALMA radio telescopes in Chile’s Atacama Desert and the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico.
“We collected multi-wavelength observations from a variety of telescopes that suggest that the black hole emits mini-jets every time it swallows something strong, such as a cloud of gas,” the authors explain. This outflow creates a series of expanding bubbles that extend for at least 500 light years.
According to experts, the jet of material would have been expelled from the black hole approximately 2,000 years ago. It is a leak of extremely hot “waste” that expels Sagittarius A *, and that is part of the stars and the gas that accumulates as a product of its gravitational attraction.
“Our central black hole clearly increased in luminosity at least 1 million times in the last million years . That was enough for a jet to hit the galactic halo, “said Alex Wagner, an astronomer at the University of Tsukuba, who was also involved in the study published in the Astrophysical Journal.
Referencia: Gerald Cecil et al. 2021. Tracing the Milky Way’s Vestigial Nuclear Jet. ApJ 922, 254; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac224f
