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The center of the Milky Way galaxy is a place you would not want to be. It's pretty easy here on Earth, orbiting our star and staying away from everyone, but deep in the heart of our galaxy, a monster is hiding. It's a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A * (pronounced "A star", for the little story) and although we can not see it exactly, we know it thanks to the decades-old D & # 039; scientific observations of our own galaxy and many others. other.
The intense gravitational pull of the black hole attracts almost everything, but nearby debris has not yet engulfed the orbits in a pattern called accretion disk. New research shows that with dust and overheated gases, there is also a relatively cooler ring of gas in the vicinity.
The research, which was published in a new article in Nature, describes this ring of cold gas never detected before, but "cold" is perhaps not the best term to designate it. The gas is still incredibly hot at around 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but it's a lot sweeter than the 18 million degrees Fahrenheit hot gas strips detected near the black hole in the past.
The way in which the various gases – as well as the dust and other debris contained in the accretion disk – have come together and the mechanisms at work in the disc remain a mystery. In the future, researchers want to further probe the workings of the area surrounding the Milky Way black hole and learn more about how it works.
"We were the first to image this elusive disc and study its rotation," said Elena Murchikova, the article's main author, in a statement. "We are also probing the accretion in the black hole. It's important because it's our nearest supermassive black hole. Despite this, we still do not understand how this accumulation works. We hope that these new observations from ALMA will help the black hole to reveal some of its secrets. "
Image Source: NRAO / AUI / NSF; S. Dagnello
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