The latest Harvard discovery shows that the galaxyOur Milky Way is throwing balls to the Andromeda galaxy and back.
In centre of galaxy our 26.000 light years away from Earth, lives an oversized 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 up stars and spit out their remains, in the form of planet-sized balls of gas, traveling at incredible speeds. But new research presented this week in the congress of the American Astronomical Society 2017 demonstrates that our Milky Way's black hole may be playing a game of "cosmic 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 James Guillochon's mentor, Harvard astrophysicist, noticed that pieces of the stars can coagulate like gas balls ranging in size from the size of the planet Neptune up to multiple times greater than Zeus. The extreme black hole environment catches these balls in space at 20 speeds of millions of miles per hour, so they can quickly escape completely from the galaxy.
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 δύο αυτοί γαλαξίες πετάνε πλανήτες ο ένας στον άλλον σαν μικρά παιδιά.
