New detailed images of a gas filament in the center of the Milky Way have shown that this curved, narrow "thread" extends beyond the event horizon of the supermassive black hole.
The center of our Galaxy is shrouded in dense accumulations of gas and dust, through which radio emission from the bright object SgrA * breaks through - it is believed that this is a supermassive black hole with a mass of 4 million solar masses. Of course, it attracts a lot of attention from astronomers and is studied with special interest, every now and then presenting new surprises and riddles.
Last year, observations of the Karl Jansky VLA radio telescopes brought another discovery: a dense and narrow filament of matter, a filament stretched out to a black hole in a curved bundle 2.3 light years long. A new article, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, presented data from new observations of this object - and its new, highest quality images. They show how the "tail" of the filament reaches the very event horizon.
NSF / VLA / UCLA / M. Morris et al.
Mark Morris of the University of California Los Angeles and his colleagues investigated the SgrA Western Filament (SgrAWF) using radio antennas at the large VLA observatory. The authors improved the observation technique by tracing the SgrAWF filament almost to the most supermassive black hole. This, in their opinion, indicates that the hole is the source of the SgrAWF. In general, there is no exact idea of what kind of filament it is and how it was formed, and scientists put forward several hypotheses on this score.
According to one of them, the rotation of a supermassive black hole and a hot accretion disk around it creates magnetic fields that form a "force highway" along the axis of rotation. Particles caught here will be thrown away at high speed. Another - much less likely - hypothesis suggests that SgrAWF is formed by a cosmic string, a hypothetical one-dimensional "fold" of space-time, which is moving towards the center of the Galaxy and will soon be captured by a supermassive black hole.
Finally, the third possibility is provided by chance itself: it is possible that the hole and SgrAWF are not connected at all. Such Nonthermal Radio Filament (NRF) have been observed before, although they are usually noticeably longer. But even so, scientists are puzzled by the curved shape of SgrAWF - what gave it that look is also still unknown.
Yesterday Sergey Vasiliev
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