A titanic, expanding beam of energy sprang from close to the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way just 3.5 million years ago, sending a cone-shaped burst of radiation through both poles of the Galaxy and out into deep space.
That’s
the finding arising from research conducted by a team of scientists led
by Professor Joss Bland-Hawthorn from Australia’s ARC Centre of
Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) and soon
to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The phenomenon, known as a Seyfert flare, created two enormous ‘ionisation cones’ that sliced through the Milky Way – beginning with a relatively small diameter close to the black hole, and expanding vastly as they exited the Galaxy. So powerful was the flare that it impacted on the Magellanic Stream – a long trail of gas extending from nearby dwarf galaxies called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The Magellanic Stream lies at an average 200,000 light years from the Milky Way.
The
explosion was too huge, says the Australian-US research team, to have
been triggered by anything other than nuclear activity associated with
the black hole, known as Sagittarius A, or Sgr A*, which is about 4.2
million times more massive than the Sun.
“The flare must have been a bit like a lighthouse beam,” says Professor Bland-Hawthorn, who is also at the University of Sydney.
“Imagine darkness, and then someone switches on a lighthouse beacon for a brief period of time.”
[…]
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