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Mysterious cosmic threads are reaching out from the Milky Way's monster black hole
Hundreds of filaments of gas, each 5–10 light-years in length, line the galactic center and radiate outward along the plane of the galaxy like spokes on a bicycle wheel with our galaxy's black hole at the hub, new radio observations made by South Africa's MeerKAT telescope reveal.
"It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole," said Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in a statement. "We found that these filaments are not random but appear to be tied to the outflow of our black hole."
...
On the other hand, only a few hundred of the horizontal filaments have been discovered, and all of them located on just one side of the black hole. They appear to glow from thermal radiation emitted by warm molecular gas and given that they point radially away from the black hole, could signify an outflow of material directly from Sagittarius A* itself.
Yusef-Zadeh estimates that the horizontal filaments may be only 6 million years old, and that "they must have originated with some kind of outflow from an activity that happened a few million years ago. It seems to be the result of an interaction of that outflowing material with objects near it."
https://www.space.com/milky-way-black-hole-filaments
"It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole," said Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in a statement. "We found that these filaments are not random but appear to be tied to the outflow of our black hole."
...
On the other hand, only a few hundred of the horizontal filaments have been discovered, and all of them located on just one side of the black hole. They appear to glow from thermal radiation emitted by warm molecular gas and given that they point radially away from the black hole, could signify an outflow of material directly from Sagittarius A* itself.
Yusef-Zadeh estimates that the horizontal filaments may be only 6 million years old, and that "they must have originated with some kind of outflow from an activity that happened a few million years ago. It seems to be the result of an interaction of that outflowing material with objects near it."
https://www.space.com/milky-way-black-hole-filaments
