The latest Harvard discovery shows that the galaxyOur Milky Way is throwing balls to the Andromeda galaxy and back.
In its center 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 at the 2017 American Astronomical Society meeting suggests that our Milky Way's black hole may be playing the game of the "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 with this speed they fly into intergalactic space and perhaps reach neighboring galaxies such as Andromeda. Similarly, Guillochon reported, the Andromeda Galaxy, which also has a supermassive black hole, may launch similar stellar projectiles back into our Galaxy.
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 and the James Webb Space Telescope may detect them. Until then, just watch these two galaxies throw planets at each other like little kids.