Astronomers have discovered that the massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is becoming more active.
A team of scientists from France and Belgium found that X-ray flares emanating from a black hole, located 26,000 light-years from Earth, tripled between August 2014 and 2017. The researchers reported this in their article published in the online journal arXiv – since 2014, the activity of Sgr A has increased by several wavelengths:
“Additional multiwavelength data are needed to infer the persistence of this increase and to gain information about the source of this unprecedented supermassive black hole activity.”
The scientists noted that further analysis is needed to determine what exactly is causing the increase in flares, be it the accretion disk – the gas and dust surrounding the black hole, or passing asteroids and other celestial bodies.
Black holes are some of the mysterious and most powerful objects in the universe, but what is known about them is terrifying. They completely violate the laws of physics. Scientists speak of the center of a black hole as a one-dimensional point, where gravity becomes infinite and space and time are curved.
The only other point in nature where such a feature existed is the Big Bang. There are several ways in which a black hole can form.
Scientists believe that the most common case is when a star, thousands of times the size of the Sun, falls into itself and explodes in a supernova.
Another way is when a large amount of matter, in the form of a gas cloud or a star, collapses on its own due to its own gravitational attraction.
It is also believed that the collision of two neutron stars could cause a black hole to appear.
The essence of all three methods is that a huge amount of mass located in one place can cause a black hole to appear.
Sagittarius A has a radius of 22 million kilometers and a mass four million times that of the Sun. In other words, it is a very dense object. Given its severity, a black hole is capable of completely stretching space-time to a point, and one minute spent on the edge of Sagittarius A on earth will be equal to an interval of 700 years.
