Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

There’s a bubble of hot gas zipping around our galaxy’s supermassive black hole

By

At the center of our galaxy is an enormous black hole, surrounded by a swirl of glowing hot gas which forms a ring structure around the black hole itself. This structure was famously captured in the first-ever image of the supermassive black hole, named Sagittarius A*, which was released earlier this year. Now, scientists have discovered an oddity in this dramatic environment, detecting a bubble of hot gas which is orbiting around the black hole and its ring structure.

Sagittarius A* and animation of the hot spot around it

As shown in this video animation, the bubble of hot gas is moving around the black hole in a similar manner to the way the Earth orbits the sun. This bubble of gas wasn’t seen in the image of Sagittarius A* (which was captured by a collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope) but instead was inferred from observations using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

This is the first image of Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A* for short), the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. It’s the first direct visual evidence of the presence of this black hole. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope. The telescope is named after the “event horizon”, the boundary of the black hole beyond which no light can escape.
This is the first image of Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A* for short), the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration. EHT Collaboration

One notable fact about the bubble is the tremendous speed at which it is moving, according to lead researcher Maciek Wielgus of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. “We think we’re looking at a hot bubble of gas zipping around Sagittarius A* on an orbit similar in size to that of the planet Mercury, but making a full loop in just around 70 minutes,” Wielgus said in a statement. “This requires a mind blowing velocity of about 30% of the speed of light!”

Recommended Videos

The discovery was made using data collected for the Event Horizon Telescope project, which Wielgus and colleagues were also a part of. Some of these observations caught the aftermath of an X-ray flare, which is thought to be caused by hot gas close to the black hole. In this case, the researchers saw the flare not only in the X-ray wavelength but also in radio wavelengths. That supports the idea of a hot gas bubble giving off flares, which can be used to study the magnetic field of the black hole.

The researchers now want to make more observations of the black hole and its environment using ALMA and the GRAVITY instrument on the Very Large Telescope and are hoping to directly observe an orbiting gas bubble. This could help them understand more about the physics of the extreme conditions near very large black holes.

“Hopefully, one day, we will be comfortable saying that we ‘know’ what is going on in Sagittarius A*,” said Wielgus.

The research is published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
This beautiful galaxy is being warped by its hungry supermassive black hole
This image of the spiral galaxy Messier 106, or NGC 4258, was taken with the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. A popular target for amateur astronomers, Messier 106 can also be spotted with a small telescope in the constellation Canes Venatici.

This image of the spiral galaxy Messier 106, or NGC 4258, was taken with the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. A popular target for amateur astronomers, Messier 106 can also be spotted with a small telescope in the constellation Canes Venatici. KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA Acknowledgment: PI: M.T. Patterson (New Mexico State University) Image processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), M. Zamani & D. de Martin

This stunning image of a distant galaxy was captured by the ground-based Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert. To capture distant objects in such detail, the telescope has a Mosaic camera that combines multiple captures into one image.

Read more
See a map of 25,000 supermassive black holes in distant galaxies
Preview of a Sky map showing 25,000 supermassive black holes.

Sky map showing 25,000 supermassive black holes. Each white dot is a supermassive black hole in its own galaxy. LOFAR/LOL Survey

It might look like a map of stars, but that's not what is shown in the image above. Instead, each dot on this map of the night sky represents an enormous black hole called a supermassive black hole, each in a different distant galaxy.

Read more
Hundreds of volcanoes spew sulfur into the atmosphere of Jupiter’s moon Io
Composite image showing Jupiter's moon Io in radio (ALMA), and optical light (Voyager 1 and Galileo). The ALMA images of Io show for the first time plumes of sulfur dioxide (in yellow) rise up from its volcanoes. Jupiter is visible in the background (Cassini image).

Jupiter's moon Io is a dramatic place -- even though it's just 1,131 miles across, or just a bit bigger than Earth's moon, it hosts over 400 active volcanoes, some of which are as large as 124 miles across. These volcanoes spew out sulfur gases that freeze on the moon's chilly surface and give it its distinctive yellow and orange color.

Another odd feature about Io is that it has an atmosphere, albeit an extremely thin one. At a billion times thinner than Earth's atmosphere, it's barely there, but it does exist and is composed mostly of sulfur from the volcanoes. But researchers weren't sure about how exactly this atmosphere formed, so recent research has used Earth-based telescopes to examine this puzzle.

Read more