The supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is not as dormant as had been thought, a new study shows.
Sgr A* has"always been seen as a dormant black hole," said Frederic Marin, a researcher at France's Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory and the study's first author.squatting at the middle of their galaxies go dormant after swallowing up all the nearby matter.But the international team of researchers discovered that at around the end of the 19th century, Sgr A* came out of its slumber and consumed any gas and dust unlucky enough to be within its reach.
frameborder="0″ allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen>When it was active, the black hole was"at least a million times brighter than it is today," Marin said. The surge in X-ray light was as"if a single glow-worm hidden in a forest suddenly became as bright as the Sun," French research agencyAstronomers using NASA's IXPE space observatory managed to track the X-ray light and found that it pointed straight back at Sgr A*.
The black hole"emitted an echo of its past activity, which we managed to observe for the first time," Marin said.But when matter is sucked beyond the black hole's final boundary, known as the event horizon, it emits a massive amount of heat and light before disappearing into the darkness.
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