Astronomers in Paris said Thursday that they had found a hot bubble of gas spinning clockwise around the black hole at the center of our galaxy at “mind-blowing” speeds.
The bubble was only there for a few hours, but scientists hope that finding it will help them figure out how these invisible, never-satisfied monsters in space work. The supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is in the middle of the Milky Way, about 27,000 light-years from Earth. Its huge gravity is what makes our galaxy’s spiral shape.
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, which is made up of radio dishes all over the world, took the first picture of Sagittarius A* in May. Their goal is to catch light as it disappears into black holes.
Maciek Wielgus, an astrophysicist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said that one of these dishes, the ALMA radio telescope in the Andes mountains of Chile, found something “really strange” in the Sagittarius A* data.
Wielgus told AFP that the Chandra Space Telescope saw a “huge spike” in X-rays just minutes before ALMA began taking radio data. A new study in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics says that this energy burst, which is thought to be like solar flares on the Sun, caused a hot bubble of gas to swirl around the black hole.
