Harvard's latest discovery shows that our Milky Way galaxy is throwing balls into the Andromeda galaxy and the other way around.
In its center galaxy us, 26.000 light years away from Earth, lives a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A *. Its mass, equivalent to about four million suns, extends to eight million miles, less than the distance between Mercury and the Sun. Needless to say, it is a rather strange place, so it should come as no surprise that it exhibits strange behavior.
The Sagittarius A* black hole does nothing but chew αστέρια και να φτύνει τα λείψανά τους, με τη μορφή σφαιρών αερίου μεγέθους πλανήτη, τα οποία ταξιδεύουν με απίστευτες ταχύτητες. Όμως, η νέα έρευνα που παρουσιάστηκε αυτή την εβδομάδα στο συνέδριο της Αμερικανικής Αστρονομικής Εταιρείας 2017 καταδεικνύει ότι η μαύρη τρύπα του Γαλαξία μας πιθανά παίζει το παιχνίδι του “κοσμικού spitball”.
According to the head of the survey Eden Girma, a graduate student at Harvard University and his member Banneker from the Aztlán Institute, each 10.000 year or so about an unlucky star cluster very close to the black hole Sagittarius A, falls into her deadly tidal embrace.
During 50 simulations of these interactions, Girma and his mentor James Guillochon, a Harvard astrophysicist, noticed that comeyea of stars can condense into balls of gas ranging in size from the size of the planet Neptune to many times larger than Jupiter. The extreme environment of the black hole catapults these balls into space at speeds of 20 million miles per hour, so fast they can escape the galaxy entirely.
Their experiments showed that a percentage of 95 percent of these objects and at that speed fly to the intergalactic space and perhaps reach adjacent galaxies such as Andromeda. Similarly, Guillochon said that Andromeda's galaxy, which also has an oversized black hole, can launch similar star shots back to our Milky Way.
The rest of the objects that fail to get out of the galaxy are either locked in orbit around Sagittarius A or migrate to the outer regions of our Galaxy. Some may be only a few hundred light years from Earth.
At present, no one has actually visually observed any of these objects, but next-generation observatories such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope και το James Webb Space Telescope μπορεί να τα εντοπίσουν. Μέχρι τότε, αρκεστείτε στο ότι οι two these galaxies throw planets at each other like little children.
