A fiery gas bubble orbiting the black hole of the Milky Way: at a speed of 100,000 kilometers per second

Astronomers have discovered a mass of hot gas orbiting the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy Very quickly.

A new study finds that the strong magnetic field surrounding the massive tears of space-time has increased the charge of the strange gas globules, accelerating them by up to 30% of the speed of light (300,000 kilometers per second).

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*, is about 4 million times larger than the Sun and extends about 40 million miles (60 million kilometers). Normally, anything very close to such a supermassive black hole would be sucked in by an immense gravitational force. But the newly discovered gas bubble is moving so fast that it appears to have formed a stable orbit around the vast cosmic void.

The gas bubble’s orbit around Sagittarius A* is equivalent in size to Mercury’s orbit around the Sun. However, the burning point completes a full rotation around the black hole every 70 minutes, compared to the 88 days it takes Mercury to travel the same distance, the researchers write in a new research paper published online September 22 in the Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“This requires an astonishing speed of about 30% of the speed of light,” said study lead author Masek Wilgus, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, in a statement. That’s about 201.2 million miles per hour (323.8 million km/h), or about 3,000 times faster than the Earth’s movement around the sun.

Researchers first discovered the orbital point in 2017 using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile. ALMA, made up of 66 antennas, is one of eight telescopes that make up the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which produced the first direct image of Sagittarius A* in May this year.

Researchers were calibrating ALMA to focus on arc A* for the EHT project when they detected an unusual burst of X-rays coming from the space surrounding the black hole.

Electromagnetic radiation from the glow showed signs of synchrotron acceleration (a cyclotron in which the strength of the magnetic field increases with the energy of the particles to keep their orbital radius constant).

This type of acceleration occurs when charged particles are pushed forward by a strong magnetic field, similar to the way artificial particle accelerators charge electrons, according to ScienceAlert.

The only explanation for this kind of acceleration is that the glow came from a magnetically trapped black hole disk — a ring of matter surrounding a black hole held in place by a strong magnetic field, which resists gravitational matter in the cosmic void. So the researchers concluded that the only possible origin of the flame is the supercharged drop from the gas trapped within this disk.

The researchers believe that the radio waves they detected could mean the hot spot is slowing down and losing some of its energy, according to the statement. This may indicate that the gas bubble will eventually slow down enough for the black hole’s gravity to overcome and eventually absorb the surrounding magnetic shield.

The researchers hope this new information can be used to help track additional hotspots around other black holes.

“In the future, we should be able to monitor hotspots at different frequencies using coordinated multi-wavelength observations,” study co-author Ivan Marti Vidal, a radio astronomer at the University of Valencia in Spain, said in the statement. “The success of such an undertaking would be a real milestone in our understanding of the physics of flares at the galactic center.”

While the new study improves our understanding of the core of the black hole in our Milky Way, the researchers said there is still much to learn about Sagittarius A*.

So far, telescopes have had difficulty focusing on the ultra-massive structure because it often flares up, emitting electromagnetic radiation that interferes with sensitive sensors. But the new James Webb Space Telescope will play a key role in future research around Sagittarius A* because it will be able to see beyond this interference.

“We hope one day we can feel comfortable saying we ‘know’ what’s going on in A*A,” Wilgus said. “But that day isn’t today.”

with information from Live Science // Harry Baker

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