Hubble Just Found Strange Burps Coming From The Milky Ways Black Hole

Hubble Just Found Strange ‘Burps’ Coming From The Milky Way’s Black Hole

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At the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole. Astronomers used to think it was sleeping, but Hubble just proved those theories wrong.

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Hubble Just Found Strange Burps Coming From The Milky Ways Black Hole

The black hole at the center of the Milky Way was once believed to be dormant — but NASA’s Hubble just found further evidence that there’s a leak in it shooting out huge amounts of particles and radiation. When humans think of their home in outer space, they often think of the Solar System. Not only is it where Earth lives, but it’s also home to neighboring planets like Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and others.

However, the Solar System is just a tiny part of the Milky Way galaxy. Along with the Sun and eight planets in our Solar System, also located in the Milky Way are between 100 and 400 billion other stars and at least 100 billion planets. At the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*. While this black hole was once believed to be a large sleeping monster, mounting evidence has quickly proven the exact opposite.

Over the years, astronomers have detected varying activity around the Milky Way’s black hole. It occasionally sucks in nearby stars and gas, shoots them out, and consequently blasts jets of radiation and particles out into the galaxy. Recently, NASA used X-rays from Hubble as further proof that this ‘leak’ within the black hole is still active and expulsing these jets. As the organization explains, “This supermassive black hole looks like it still has the vestiges of a blowtorch-like jet dating back several thousand years.”

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How Hubble Found The Black Hole’s Strange Leak

The photo above is a composite image of varying X-rays from Hubble. The glowing light towards the bottom represents the black hole at the Milky Way’s center. The green light directly above it is molecular gas that was pushed out of the black hole by one of its jets. NASA then believes that the jet shot upwards, eventually impacting the yellow hydrogen cloud further up. In other words, the black hole ate a star or cloud of gas, ‘burped’ it up, and then sent it hurling away in the form of molecular gas.

What happens to these jets when the black hole fires them away? According to astronomer Alex Wagner, “The streams percolate out of the Milky Way’s dense gas disk. The jet diverges from a pencil beam into tendrils, like that of an octopus.” These tendrils then turn into large bubbles that can become as large as 500 light-years.

This isn’t the first time astronomers have detected these strange ‘burps’ from the Milky Way’s black hole. It’s believed that the black hole had an especially large outburst between 2 and 4 million years ago — thus creating two large bubbles still visible above the Milky Way. NASA first discovered signs of these bubbles in 2003, then again in 2010, and fully mapped them out in 2020. As further research is done and astronomers keep learning more about the Milky Way’s active center, the more we can know about the strange place in the cosmos we all call home.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/milky-way-black-hole-burp-leak-nasa-hubble/

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