Milky Way’s Black Hole is Shooting Particle Jets

X-ray and radio observations offer the best evidence yet that, as long suspected, high-energy particles stream from the heart of our galaxy

Associate Editor Clara Moskowitz

A torrent of energetic particles appears to be spewing from the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, coming from the gigantic black hole that lies at its heart, according to a new study.

Such jets are common throughout the universe, and most supermassive black holes are thought to produce them. When matter falls into these behemoths, some material also is accelerated away, usually in two straight beams that fly out along the black hole’s spin axis.

The Milky Way’s giant black hole, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “Sagittarius A-star”) has long been theorized to have jets, but evidence was inconclusive. Now researchers have combined x-ray photographs of the galaxy’s center from NASA’s Chandra space telescope with radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA) observatory in New Mexico to offer the best support yet for the idea of jets from Sagittarius A*. The x-ray photos show a wispy bright line of gas that is emitting x-ray light to one side of the black hole—perhaps indicating the jet itself—and the radio observations highlight a wall of gas that scientists think is a shock front created where the jet is slamming into a cloud, snow-plowing the gas into a clump.

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