Our galaxy's central supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* occasionally gobbles material and emits bright x-ray flares.
Michigan State University researcher Grace Sanger-Johnson found nine previously undiscovered flares from Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, by sifting through a decade’s worth of X-ray data. Credit: NuSTAR/NASASagittarius A*
Two researchers from Michigan State University—Grace Sanger-Johnson and Jack Uteg—studied the flares and their light-echoes in detail. What they found shows activity at Sgr A* in the very distant past when Sgr A* ingested material. X-ray emissions from that activity traveled for hundreds of years from Sgr A* to bounce off of and brighten a nearby molecular cloud. That created a light echo that traveled another roughly 26,000 years before reaching Earth.
So, astronomers took notice when it brightened up in X-rays, according to Uteg, who is constructing a timeline of Sgr Apast outbursts. “The brightness we see is most likely the delayed reflection of past X-ray outbursts from Sgr A,” he said. “We first observed an increase in luminosity around 2008. Then, for the next 12 years, X-ray signals from the Bridge continued to increase until it hit peak brightness in 2020.
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