At the heart of our Milky Way lies Sagittarius A*, a bright region and a very powerful radio source. It is also part of a larger region called Sagittarius A. It contains a supermassive black hole, which is a common feature where It is believed that there are similar black holes at the centers of most Spiral galaxies and elliptical.
Mysterious new leads
In the early 1980s, Farhad Yousefzadeh, a radio astronomer and professor of physics and astronomy at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences (Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences) at Northwestern University, giant one-dimensional filaments dangling vertically near Sagittarius A*, where our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole resides, and now Zadeh and his collaborators have discovered a new set of filaments, except that these filaments are much shorter and lie horizontally (or radially) and spread out like rods. On bicycle wheels from a black hole.
Although the two groups of threads share many similarities, Youssefzadeh assumes that they have different origins. While the vertical threads sweep the galaxy at a height of up to 150 light-years, the horizontal threads look more like dots and dashes of Morse code, and permeate only one side of the “Sagittarius” region. a*”, and the team has published results their studies These leads are published on June 2 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Researcher Yousef Zadeh says in Statement Journalist published by Northwestern University “It was a surprise to suddenly find a new group of structures that seemed to be pointing in the direction of the black hole. I was really shocked when I saw them. We had to do a lot of work to prove that we are not fooling ourselves. And we found that these threads are not random “But they seem to be related to the flow of our black hole. By studying them, we can learn more about the direction of the black hole’s accretion disk. It’s exhilarating when one finds something orderly in the middle of the chaotic field of our galaxy’s core.”
The latest study builds on 4 decades of Yousefzadeh’s research. After first discovering vertical filaments in 1984 with Mark Morris and Don Chance, Yousefzadeh and Ian Heywood and their collaborators later discovered two giant bubbles emitting radio waves near Sagittarius A*. And then – according to a series of scientific publications in 2022 – Yousefzadeh (in collaboration with Heywood, Richard Arendt and Mark Wardle) revealed nearly a thousand vertical threads that appeared in pairs and groups, often stacked evenly or side by side like strings on a string. harp.
Radio astronomy technology
Yousefzadeh credits many of the new discoveries to improved radio astronomy technology, notably the Meerkat telescope of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO). Zadeh’s team used a technique to remove background and smooth out noise from Meerkat images in order to separate the filaments. Of the surrounding objects, he commented, “Meerkat observations are a game-changer. The advances in technology and dedicated observation time have given us new information. It is truly a technical achievement by radio astronomers.”
After studying the vertical filaments for decades, Yousefzadeh was shocked to discover horizontal counterparts estimated to be around 6 million years old. While both groups include radio-visible one-dimensional filaments that appear to be associated with activities in the center of the galaxy, the similarities end there. Since there are many differences:
- The vertical filaments are perpendicular to the galactic plane; While the horizontal threads were found parallel to the plane of the galaxy, but they are directed radially towards the center of the galaxy, where the black hole is located.
- The vertical threads are magnetic and relativistic; While the horizontal threads seem to emit heat radiation.
- The vertical filaments contain particles moving at speeds close to the speed of light; The horizontal filaments seem to accelerate thermal matter in a molecular cloud.
- There are several hundred vertical threads and a few hundred horizontal threads. The vertical filaments are much larger than the horizontal filaments, reaching up to 150 light-years in height, while the horizontal filaments are only 5 to 10 light-years long.
- Vertical threads also decorate the space around the galactic nucleus; As for the horizontal threads, they seem to spread in one direction only, pointing towards the black hole.
More research
Yusufzadeh states that “one of the most important effects of the radial flow that we discovered is the direction of the accretion disk and the flows from the region (Sagittarius A *) along the galactic plane.” The accretion disk is a belt of gas and cosmic dust surrounding a star in the process of formation (protostar) dwarf A white, neutron star, or black hole orbiting around it due to gravity.
The new discovery is full of the unknown, and Yusufzadeh’s work has just begun to reveal its secrets and try to think of a reasonable explanation for its mechanisms and origins of formation. “We believe it originated with a kind of flow that emerged from an activity that occurred a few million years ago. It appears to be the result of the interaction of that flowing substance,” Zadeh says. With objects close to it, but our work is not complete yet, we always need new observations, constantly challenging our ideas and revising our analyses.”
