Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Space Telescope, scientists have discovered a new cosmic “vent” spewing hot gas from Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole that sits at the very heart of our Milky Way galaxy.
The newly discovered hole is associated with a chimney formation oriented at right angles in the Milky Way disk. Chandra’s observation reveals how a “tunnel” at the center of our galaxy helps guide matter to its outer regions.
Many supermassive black holes in the universe are voracious consumers of gas and dust and even stars around them. The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sgr A*, on the other hand, absorbs light. In fact, it consumes so little matter that if it were human, it would survive on about one grain of rice every million years. Chandra’s observations could reveal how this cosmic picky eater selects some matter for consumption and rejects other material.
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The hole, detected in X-ray observations of the Galactic Center by Chandra, is located about 700 light-years from the region’s exact central zone and at the top of the “chimney.” This chimney was previously discovered with the help of the European Space Agency (ESA) XMM-Newton, which, like Chandra, observes the universe in X-rays.
The Galactic Center image shows blue X-ray data from Chandra that has been enhanced by observations collected by South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope, visible in red. This radio wave data reveals the effects of the magnetic fields that trap the gas in the chimney.
The new hole can be seen at the top of the image as a bright blue and white blob against a background of darker blue gas.
White beams of brighter X-rays appear in the enhanced image, which contains only Chandra data. The team behind this study theorizes that these are the walls of a cylindrical tunnel through which hot gas moves up and away from Sgr A*, as well as away from its immediate surroundings.
The team behind these observations has an idea of how this vent was created. They believe that hot gas passing through the chimney hits cooler gas in its path, creating shock waves that result in brighter X-ray walls of the vent. The researchers theorize that the left side of the vent appears brighter in the image than the right side because the upwardly moving hot gas hits the left side of the chimney wall more directly and therefore with greater force.
As for where that jet of hot gas is coming from? Scientists believe that as the material falls toward Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole erupts and this pushes this material up the chimney and out along the vent. What remains to be determined, however, is how often matter infalls towards Sgr A*.
Research conducted prior to these discoveries suggested that Sgr A* and its surroundings at the Galactic Center experience dramatic X-ray bursts every few centuries. These X-ray bursts may be an important part of the process by which hot gas is ejected from Sgr A*.
Sgr A* also experiences much rarer feeding events, which may play an important role in the whole process of gas routing. About every 20,000 years, the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole is thought to rip apart and swallow an unfortunate star that has come too close to it.
These events, called “tidal disruption events” or “TDEs,” result in the explosive release of huge amounts of energy that are channeled up the black hole’s chimney along with the leftover stellar material from the shattered star that Sgr A* would discard as dessert .
A pre-peer-reviewed version of the team’s Sgr A* study is available in the arXiv paper repository.
