It took about two hours for a bubble of hot electrons to whirl around the black hole.
There is a person by the name ofLeah Crane.
There is a bubble of hot electrons circling Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Black holes eat material around them, and this bubble could help us understand that.
The black hole in Sagittarius A* was emitting a huge flare of X-rays, which Maciek and his colleagues used to observe the area around it. They saw a huge hot spot of radiation, most likely made up of electrons heated to billions of degrees, circling a black hole about the same distance as Mercury.
It took this bubble about 70 minutes to make a loop around Sagittarius A*, which is 30 per cent the speed of light. The researchers were only able to see it for a couple of laps before it faded.
A small bubble can't be too small because it won't disappear quickly. As the bubble traveled around the black hole it would experience less shear force. It is not a small guy.
The magnetic fields affecting the bubble seem to be aligned as we would expect them to be based on a model of black holes. The model of these systems may have something to do with reality.
The material surrounding the black hole circles it on a path to the disc of the galaxy, which means that we are seeing it from face-on despite being located in the disc. It seems like we should be seeing it edge-on, but it is not. "It's strange."
We will have to do research from afar if we want to learn more about how black holes swallow up matter and why they emit flares.
You would have to be very resistant to survive the many billions of degrees because of the light bending in the black hole's gravity and the view from this bubble would be a sort of magical kaleidoscope. If you were to materialise inside the bubble, you would be gone very quickly.
There is a journal reference to astronomy and astrophysics.
It's free to sign up for our newsletter every Friday.
There are more on this topic.