agencies
Tuesday, 06 June 2023 02:00 PM
Astronomers have discovered hundreds of strange filament-like structures in the center of our galaxy, which may trace the violent path of an ancient black hole, RT reports.
According to a new study published in June in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, each of these previously unknown “filaments” is between 5 and 10 light-years across – thousands of times the distance between the Sun and Pluto – but is visible only in radio waveswhich means that the structures were likely created by bursts of high-energy particles invisible to the naked eye.
And the vast structures are located in the middle of our galaxy milky way It points to the central supermassive black hole of our galaxy. Scientists say there are hundreds of them, each 5 to 10 light-years across, and that they may be the unhealed scars of an ancient, high-energy black hole that tore apart the surrounding gas clouds.
Study lead author Farhad Yousefzadeh, professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University in Illinois, said: “It was a surprise to suddenly find a new set of structures that seemed to be oriented in the direction of the black hole. I was really shocked when I saw it and had to do a lot of work.” To prove that we weren’t fooling ourselves, we found that these threads are not random but seem to be related to the outflow of our black hole.”
He continued, by studying it, more information can be learned about the direction of the black hole’s rotation and accretion disk. It is satisfying when one finds order in the middle of the chaotic field of our galactic core.”
Scientists do not have a definite explanation for the source of these structures, and much remains a mystery about their existence. But one possible explanation is that it was expelled after some activity a few million years ago.
In the early 1980s, Professor Yousefzadeh found a group of giant one-dimensional filaments hanging across our galaxy, near the region of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, a cosmic monster with a mass of more than 4 million suns. The new filaments, previously undetected, are much shorter and radiate out from the black hole.
The newly discovered structures are much shorter than their previously discovered columnar counterparts, and there are far fewer of them. Despite these differences, scientists believe that the newly discovered structures arose from an eruption of similar energy from our galaxy’s central black hole that may have occurred about 6 million years ago, the team estimated.
Yousefzadeh concluded that his team must make new radio observations to learn more and more accurately about the monster’s violent past life at the center of our galaxy.
