For decades, astronomers know that Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, is abnormally active. A constant flow of incandescent matter and gas reveals that this gravitational structure devours without rest. Although powerful, the “fireworks party” by Sagittarius A* is usually invisible for most telescopes on earth. Fortunately, science now has an ace under manga: the James Webb space telescope (JWST).
Recently, researchers from the Northwestern University, in the United States, obtained the longest record so far from the flares from this supermassive black hole. To do this, they used the nearby infrared chamber of the JWST to monitor the region for 48 hours over a year. With this, it was possible to visualize the sudden heat firms emanating from Sagittarius A* in a long enough period to appreciate the changes.
“In our data, we saw a bubble brightness and constantly change. And thenboom! Suddenly a great brightness explosion appeared, which later calmed down. We could not find a pattern in this activity. It seems to be random. The black hole activity profile was new and exciting every time we observed it, “said Yusuf-Zadeh, lead author of the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letter.
What are the flares of black holes?
Inactive black holes are virtually invisible. They do not emit light or let something out of them. However, it is not the case of those who are consuming gas or stars. Although they are still dark, the matter that orbits around it is heated to the point of illuminating. Thus an accretion disk is formed that emits infrared radiation, X -rays and gamma, emissions that can be measured from Earth.
In addition, the exotic environment around a black hole such as Sagittarius A* causes flares, large and brief energy expulsions that illuminate its environment. Astrophysics currently tries to understand them. For example, it was recently discovered that some of them originate from the reconnection of magnetic fields on accretion discs. This is the same principle that produces the expulsions of coronal mass in the Sun. The explanation was adopted by the Yusuf-Zadeh team in the case of flares in the center of the Milky Way.
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