Our Supermassive Black Hole Fired Off A Giant Firework 3.5 Million Years Ago

Our supermassive black hole is currently just like a panda. So lazy that it hardly ever eats anything. But 3.5 million years ago it turned into a “kung-fu panda” firing off a giant eruption.

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Our supermassive black hole is almost cuddly in galactic terms. It may seem scary at first, which is to be expected from an object with a mass of over 4 million Suns and at the edge of the laws of physics. But there is no comparing it to supermassive black holes from active galaxies. If you observed our supermassive black hole for a long time you may even fall asleep from boredom. But sometimes it likes to be active.

Joss Bland-Hawthorn from the Australian ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3D (ASTRO 3-D) and his coworkers say that about 3.5 million years ago our cuddly blackhole fired of an intense beam of ionizing radiation. This means that from both poles of the supermassive black hole streams of particles flowed into the Milkyway and farther into the intergalactic void.

The authors call it the Seyfert flare. Its streams should have a cone shape which was expanding as it flowed outside of the galaxy. The eruption was so big that even the Magellan stream of cosmic gas which flows the Large and Small Magellan Cloud was hit. And that is roughly 200 thousand light-years away from us! The researchers assume that it was a large eruption of radiation, energy, and particles which was likely created by mechanisms similar to what we can find in the cores of active galaxies. It is almost as if the Milkyway activated a lighthouse for a short time.

Bland-Hawthorn and his collages think that Seyfert flare took place around 3.5 million years ago. This may sound like a long time ago, but in galactic (and universal) timescale this is just a moment ago. The eruption itself probably lasted around 300 thousand years.

This shows us that the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy isn't such a nice cuddly creature as it may seem. And we should be very glad that we live at the edge of our galaxy, far from any threatening beams of radiation.

Sources:

• https://phys.org/news/2019-10-center-milky.html
• https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02225

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