Astronomers have discovered a mysterious object, which they believe is a giant hot bubble of gas around the Milky Way’s black hole every seventy minutes. This means that the object is moving at a mind-boggling 30% of the speed of light.
Observations by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed something unusual near the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. Astronomers believe there is a mystery object, a hot spot, that circles around Sagittarius A*. According to the researchers, the discovery will aid in our comprehension of the bizarre yet dynamic ecosystem.
The object that circles the black hole is most likely a hot bubble of gas that swirled around Sagittarius A* in an orbit comparable to that of the planet Mercury, according to the experts. The only difference is that it completes one orbit in around seventy minutes.
Orbits of the G objects at the center of our galaxy, with the supermassive black hole indicated with a white cross. Stars, gas and dust are in the background. (Credit: Anna Ciurlo, Tuan Do/UCLA Galactic Center Group)
In other words, according to Maciek Wielgus of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, this puzzling object requires a mind-boggling velocity of nearly 30% of the speed of light to complete its orbit in seventy minutes. Wielgus conducted the study that described the hot gas bubble orbiting the black hole, which was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
ALMA, a radio telescope co-owned by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), was utilised to perform observations during the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration’s attempt to picture black holes. In April 2017, the EHT joined eight existing radio telescopes across the world, including ALMA, and photographed Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, for the first time. To calibrate the EHT data, a team of EHT Collaboration members, including Wielgus, used ALMA data taken concurrently with the EHT observations of Sagittarius A. The scientists discovered further information about the black hole’s nature using solely ALMA observations.
The observations were made just after NASA’s Chandra Space Telescope detected an X-ray flare produced from our galaxy’s centre. There is a suggestion that these flares are caused by hot spots, which are hot gas bubbles that orbit exceedingly quickly and near to black holes. Previously, they were observed using X-ray and infrared telescopes.