Click here to watch more Space.com videos.
The black hole at the center of our universe "burps" out into space.
Sagittarius A* is over 4 million times larger than the sun. Its accretion disk is made up of stars and gas clouds. The material that falls is superheated and then expelled from the black hole as narrow beams.
The remnants of a "blowtorch-like jet" are thousands of years old. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has not been able to photograph the jet. According to the space agency, observations from the space telescope show that a glowing cloud of hydrogen near the black hole was hit by an explosion.
The black hole of the universe has a blowtorch-like jet.
The black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy has a mini-jet that extends from it. The image is from NASA/ESA/Gerald Cecil.
The material that shoots into space is believed to be an outflowing jet of material that occasionally shoots into space as material like nearby gas clouds falls into the central black hole. As the jet travels away from the black hole, it collides with the hydrogen cloud and interacts with the gas in a way that creates multiple streams of expanding bubbles that extend out roughly 500 light-years into the Galactic halo.
The streams come from the dense gas disk of the Milky Way, according to the statement. The jet is like that of an animal.
A jet is being found.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Jansky Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico used data from the previous year to show evidence of a southern jet near the black hole.
Researchers looked for traces of a northern counter-jet using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the ALMA Observatory. While the ALMA observations showed a small linear feature that extended 15 light-years into the black hole, Hubble images show a bubble of hot gas that extends at least 35 light-years from the black hole.
The black hole burps out "mini-jets" every time it consumes something large, according to the researchers. The bubble is inflated by the interaction between the jet and hydrogen gas. The researchers were able to recreate their findings using simulations of jet outflows.
A visualization of the edge-on of the Milky Way. The image shows a cloud of hydrogen near the black hole, which is hit by a small jet of material ejected from the black hole. The image is from NASA/ESA/Gerald Cecil.
There are bubbles in the Fermi radiation.
Hubble and other telescopes have found evidence that suggests the black hole in the center of the Milky Way created a pair of bubbles that glowed above our galaxy.
"Our central black hole appeared to have increased in luminosity at least 1 millionfold in the last million years," he said. That was enough for a jet to hit the halo.
Similar evidence has been found in an active spiral galaxy, which is 47 million light-years away. The statement says that the galaxy has bubble features aligned along an outflow jet from its central black hole.
Gerald Cecil, the lead author of the study and a researcher from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said in the statement that the bow shock bubble at the top of the outflow coincides with the start of the Fermi bubble. "NGC 1068 may be showing us what the Milky Way was up to when it had a major power surge several million years ago."
Hubble data was used in the new study to better understand the expansion velocity and composition of the Milky Way's Fermi gamma-ray bubbles. The black hole in the center of the Milky Way was so powerful that it illuminated a gaseous structure 200,000 light-years away. The gas is still glowing from that event because of the powerful blast.
The researchers said that the black hole's "mini-jet" is close enough to reignite if it were to power up again.
Cecil said that the black hole needed to increase its luminosity by a hundredfold over that time to refill the jet channel with emitting particles. It would be cool to see how far the jet goes. It would take hundreds of thousands of years for the jet to sustain itself, because the bubbles are 50,000 light years across.
The Astrophysical Journal published these findings.
Follow SamAshley13. Follow us on social media.
