Brandon is the space/physics editor at Live Science. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, CBS.com, the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and other outlets. He holds a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, with minors in journalism and media arts.
The monster black hole at the center of our galaxy may be unleashing huge, gassy explosions — and now, astronomers think they've pinpointed the exact spot where that superheated gas is spilling into the Milky Way.
The discovery could unlock secrets about the supermassive black hole's eating habits — and help reveal the true nature of some of the most mysterious objects lurking in the galactic center. But infalling matter doesn't always make it into our black hole's maw. Sometimes, matter gets channeled by powerful magnetic fields into jets that spew away from the black hole at high speeds. In 2019, astronomers spotted evidence of our black hole's messy eating habits when they detected two huge chimneys — one towering above Sgr A* and one descending below — siphoning hot gas away from the galactic center for hundreds of light-years in each direction.
This discovery prompted the authors of the new study to investigate the region further. To do so, they used data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which is designed to detect extremely hot gases. If that's the case, this black hole vent-and-chimney system may be the source of some of the most mysterious objects in our galaxy — the gargantuan Fermi bubbles and eROSITA bubbles, which overlap each other while straddling the galaxy's center like a giant, invisible hourglass.
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