Astronomers said on Thursday they detected a bubble of hot gas spinning clockwise around the black hole at the center of our galaxy at “mind-boggling” speeds. The detection of the bubble, which only survived a few hours, is expected to provide insight into how these invisible and insatiable galactic monsters work.

The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* lurks in the middle of the Milky Way about 27,000 light-years from Earth, and its immense pull gives our home galaxy its signature swirl.

The first image of Sagittarius A* was revealed in May by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, which links radio antennas around the world with the goal of detecting light as it disappears into the jaws of black holes.

One of those dishes, the ALMA radio telescope in Chile’s Andes mountains, detected something “really puzzling” in the Sagittarius A* data, said Maciek Wielgus, an astrophysicist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

Astronomers detect hot gas bubble spinning at ‘mind-blowing’ speeds around Milky Way’s black holeAstronomers detect hot gas bubble spinning at ‘mind-boggling’ speeds around Milky Way’s black hole
Astronomers said on Thursday they detected a bubble of hot gas spinning clockwise around the black hole at the center of our galaxy at “mind-boggling” speeds. The detection of the bubble, which only survived a few hours, is expected to provide insight into how these invisible and insatiable galactic monsters work.

This is the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, an array that linked eight existing radio observatories around the planet to form a single virtual “Earth-sized” telescope. Although we can’t see the event horizon itself, we can see light bent by the black hole’s powerful gravity.
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Just minutes before ALMA’s radio data collection began, the Chandra Space Telescope observed a “huge increase” in X-rays, Wielgus told AFP.

This burst of energy, thought to be similar to solar flares on the sun, sent a bubble of hot gas spinning around the black hole, according to a new study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The gas bubble, also known as a hot spot, had an orbit similar to Mercury’s trip around the sun, said study lead author Wielgus.

But while Mercury takes 88 days to make that trip, the bubble made it in just 70 minutes. That means he traveled at around 30 percent of the speed of light.

“So it’s an absolutely, ridiculously fast spinning bubble,” Wielgus said, calling it “mind-boggling.”

The scientists were able to track the bubble through their data for about an hour and a half; it is unlikely to have survived more than a couple of orbits before being destroyed.

Wielgus said the observation supported a theory known as MAD. “MAD like a madman, but also CRAZY like stopped magnetic discs,” he said.

The phenomenon is thought to occur when there is such a strong magnetic field at the mouth of a black hole that it prevents material from being sucked in.