Milky Way's supermassive black hole is 'leaking' streams of particles, finds NASA

NASA scientists have found a ‘leak’ in the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. Based on the data gathered by several ground-based and space telescopes, the scientists found that the leak in the black hole named Sagittarius A* resulted in the emission of a blowtorch-like jet dating back several thousand years. The agency states that this discovery has proved that Sagittarius A* is not inactive as it periodically emits charged particles every time stars and gas clouds fall into it.

Astronomers find Sagittarius A* ‘burping out’ jet of particles

After conducting research based on observations of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray observatory, the astronomers confirmed that the black hole, which is 4.1 million times more massive than our Sun, is “not a sleeping monster”. Besides, data from ALMA radio telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert, and the Very Large Array (VLA) telescope in New Mexico were also gathered to detect the periodic emission of charged particles. NASA called it a ‘phantom jet’ as of now, while Hubble has not been able to photograph the emission.

According to the agency, the evidence for the ‘leak’ near the black hole was first found in 2013 as the Chandra space telescope and the VLA telescope in New Mexico detected the X-rays and radio waves emitted by the entity. NASA says that it was Gerald Cecil of the University of North Carolina who pieced together multiwavelength observations from a variety of telescopes to confirm that the black hole ‘burps out’ mini-jets every time it swallows something hefty, like a gas cloud. “Like in archeology, you dig and dig to find older and older artefacts until you come upon remnants of a grand civilization”, Cicil said as per NASA’s report. Co-author Alex Wagner of Tsukuba University also supported Cicil’s argument saying, “Our central black hole clearly surged in luminosity at least 1 millionfold in the last million years. That sufficed for a jet to punch into the Galactic halo”. 

Interestingly, the Milky Way's black hole had an outburst about 2-4 million years ago, according to the observations by Hubble and other space telescopes. When the explosion was observed by Hubble in ultraviolet-light spectra, it was found that the powerful explosion even lit up the Magellanic gaseous structure which is about 200,000 light-years from the black hole. Surprisingly, the gas is still glowing millions of years after the explosion. 

Image: Twitter/@Hubble_space