In 1936, in The Realm of the Nebulae, Edwin Hubble – who proved that objects formerly referred to as “nebulae” were actually galaxies outside the Milky Way – wrote that he eventually reached the extreme limits of our telescopes where ‘. “We measure shadows and look for ghostly measurement errors for landmarks that are barely substantial.” Fast forward to today: a cold mystery gas from the center of the Milky Way, with its extreme astrophysics, is “shooting like bullets” discovered by a international team of astronomers – a phenomenon that has important implications for the future of our home galaxy.
“Galaxies can be really good at shooting themselves in the foot,” said Naomi McClure-Griffiths of the Australian National University (ANU). “If you expel a lot of mass, you lose some material that could have been used. to form stars, and if you lose enough of them, the galaxy can not form stars at all, so seeing hints of the Milky Way losing this star-forming gas is kind of exciting – it makes you wonder what’s going on. next will happen! “
“Phantom Relic From The Big Bang at Milky Way’s Black Hole”
“The wind at the center of the Milky Way has been the subject of much debate since the discovery a decade ago of the so-called Fermi Bubbles – two giant orbs filled with hot gas and cosmic rays,” said McClure-Griffiths. “We have found that not only hot gas comes from the center of our galaxy, but also cold and very dense gas. This cold gas is much heavier, so it moves less easily.”
“Black hole relics?” –Mystery of Enormous Bubbles Towering Over the Milky Way
The center of the Milky Way is home to a supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A *, but it is unclear whether this black hole displaced the gas, or whether it was blown by the thousands of massive stars in the center of the galaxy.
“From Before His Birth” – Oldest, unbelievable stars in universe found in the center of Milky Way
The image above shows the central region of the Milky Way – a region of exotic collection of objects, including the supermassive black hole that weighs about 4 million times the mass of the Sun, clouds of gas at temperatures of millions of degrees, neutron stars and whites dwarf stars tear material from companion stars and beautiful vines of radio emission. The region around Sagittarius A * can be seen in this new composite image with Chandra data (green and blue) combined with radio data (red) from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, which will eventually become part of the Square Kilometer Array. (X-ray: NASA / CXC / UMass / D. Wang et al .; Radio: NRF / SARAO / MeerKAT
Phenomena of “Right Flag to Earth” – Capturing the Red Flag in the Center of Milky Way
“We do not know how the black hole as the star formation can produce this phenomenon. We are still looking for the smoking gun, but it gets more complicated the more we learn from it, “said lead author Dr. Enrico Di Teodoro of Johns Hopkins University.” This is the first time such a thing has been observed in us. galaxy. We see this kind of process happening in other galaxies. But, with external galaxies you get much more massive black holes, the star formation activity is higher, it makes it easier for the galaxy to dislodge material. And these other galaxies are obviously a long way off. away, we can not see them in much detail. Our own galaxy is almost like a laboratory that we can actually get into and try to understand how things work by looking closely. “
The gas was observed with the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.
The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via ANU and Nature
