Astronomers said Thursday they have spotted a hot bubble of gas spinning clockwise around the black hole at the center of our galaxy at "mind blowing" speeds.
The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* lurks in the middle of the Milky Way some 27,000 light years from Earth, and its immense pull gives our home galaxy its characteristic swirl.
The first-ever image of Sagittarius A* was revealed in May by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, which links radio dishes around the world aiming to detect light as it disappears into the maw of black holes.
One of those dishes, the ALMA radio telescope in Chile's Andes mountains, picked up something "really puzzling" in the Sagittarius A* data, said Maciek Wielgus, an astrophysicist at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.
This burst of energy, thought to be similar to solar flares on the sun, sent a hot bubble of gas swirling around the black hole, according to a new study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
While Sagittarius A* is four million times the mass of our sun, it only shines with the power of about 100 suns, "which is extremely unimpressive for a supermassive black hole," Wielgus said.
But it is probably a good thing that our galaxy has a "starving black hole" at its center, Wielgus said.
UK
Australia
France
Germany
Russia
India
Canada