Astronomers have found a new set of whiskers in the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy: filaments of radio energy several light-years long, streaming outward along the galactic plane.
The streaks could be the fading remnants of explosive eruptions from the black hole, Sagittarius A*, which contains the mass of 4 million suns, according to Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University.
Led by Dr. Yusef-Zadeh is a team of radio astronomers who studied Sagittarius A* using the MeerKAT telescope, the wide array of antennas of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory. They published their results on June 2 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The discovery adds a new dimension to the complexity of the Milky Way’s electricity. In its structure, the galaxy resembles a sunny-side-up egg, with a bulbous, luminous center surrounded by a flat disk of stars, gas and dust.
Dr. Yusef-Zadeh, a dedicated explorer of the dark heart of space, and his colleagues have already seen radio filaments, thin magnetic tubes of energy 150 light-years long, running perpendicular to the galactic plane like pickets. a fence.
The new filaments are shorter – a few light-years long – and they run in a different direction, parallel to the galactic plane instead of through it. “It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to point in the direction of the black hole,” Yusef-Zadeh said in a statement released by Northwestern University. “I was really stunned when I saw them.”
He added in an email: “The filaments show up beautifully when you know what you’re looking for. It was an amazing moment for us to realize that these filaments were pointing towards the black hole.”
The geometry of the new streaks indicates that the black hole rotates on an axis that is also parallel to the plane, added Dr. Yusef-Zadeh. Energy is squeezed from the poles like toothpaste from a tube. Astronomers still don’t know what the perpendicular vertical filament is, he said.
Future observations with the Event Horizon Telescope, the distant network of Earthbound observing posts that in 2022 produced the first image of Sagittarius A*, should shed further light on the behavior and orientation of the black hole, said Dr. Yusef-Zahed. He added: “It is satisfying when one finds order in the midst of a chaotic field of the nucleus of our galaxy.”
