Nobel-Prize laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, for whom NASA’s Chandra Observatory was named, described black holes as “the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.” This quote perfectly describes the supermassive ‘pothole in eternity’ at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, a black hole known as Sagittarius A*.
“We always thought of our Galaxy as an inactive galaxy, with a not so bright center,” said Magda Guglielmo from the University of Sydney about 2019 Hubble Space Telescope data showing that a titanic, expanding beam of energy sprang from close to the SgrA*, the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, 3.5 million years ago, shooting a cone-shaped burst of radiation through both poles of the Galaxy and beyond into deep space.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
Astrophysicists have discovered a dozen black holes —“invisible one-way doors out of our universe” —gathered around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which in May, 2019 suddenly brightened, appearing like a massive, dormant volcano.
A UCLA astronomer at the Keck Telescope, astrophysicist Tuan Do, Deputy Director of the Galactic Center Group, reports that in the space of two hours, the brightness of black hole the heart of our galaxy usually a passive flickering object about twenty-five thousand light years from Earth, has increased 75-fold – the brightest it has been since scientists first started studying it more than 20 years ago.
Through decades of study, astronomers have developed a clearer picture of the chaotic and crowded neighborhood surrounding the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, at the center of the Milky Way — a region dense with roving stars, interstellar dust clouds, and a large reservoir of both phenomenally hot and comparatively colder gases. These gases are expected to orbit the black hole in a vast accretion disk that’s siphoning material extending a few tenths of a light-year from the black hole’s event horizon. (more…)
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