Hundreds of streaks of gas have been discovered extending outward from the black hole at the center of our galaxy. The Milky Way is full of cosmic filaments emanating from the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Hundreds of gas filaments, each 5-10 long light-years long, it aligns the galactic center and radiates outward along the galactic plane like the spokes on a black-hole bicycle wheel. New radio observations of our central galaxy made the South Discovery of the African MeerKAT telescope.

“It was surprising to find a new population of structures that suddenly seem to point in the direction of the black hole,” said Farhad Youssef-Zadeh of Northwestern University. expression. “We found that these filaments are not random, but appear to be related to the flow of our black hole.”

Farhad Yusef-Zadeh in 1984 discovered gigantic thin magnetic fibers, suspended perpendicular to the galactic plane (the imaginary line dividing the galaxy into “upper” and “lower” halves) near Bow A*a black hole in our core Milky Way galaxy4 million times larger than our sun. However, he was surprised to discover threads with horizontal threads that looked like Morse code lines made up of dots and dashes.

“We’ve always thought about vertical threads and their origins,” said Youssef-Zadeh. “I’m used to them being vertical. I never thought of that throughout the plane. [галактики] There may be others.”

Despite the external similarity, the two types of thread are significantly different from each other, and Youssef-Zadeh suspects they have different origins. For example, about 150 light-years long, the vertical fibers are much larger and do not point directly at the black hole, they come in pairs and clusters. They number in the thousands and are filled with particles that move from almost everywhere. speed of light.

On the other hand, only a few hundred horizontal fibers have been detected, and all of them are located on only one side of the black hole. They appear to glow from the thermal radiation emitted by the hot molecular gas, and given that they point radially from the black hole, this may represent material directly from Sagittarius A* itself.

Youssef-Zadeh estimates that the age of the horizontal filaments may be as short as 6 million years, and “must have been caused by some activity that occurred a few million years ago. This ejected material appears to be the result of interaction with nearby objects.”

What these topics can teach us about Sagittarius A* can be quite profound after all. The “No Hair Theorem” proposed by the famous theorist John Wheeler suggests that a black hole can only be described by three properties: its mass, angular momentum (the black hole’s rotational momentum), and electric charge.

Since black holes are not expected to have a particularly strong electric charge, this means that black holes are effectively defined only by their mass and spin and have no other properties (i.e., they have no “feathers”). We already know the mass of Sagittarius A* – 4.1 million times the mass of our Sun – but its rotation is less well known, thought to be no more than 10% speed of light.