CHILE: A burst of X-ray flare emitted from the middle of the Milky Way Galaxy caught by NASA’s Chandra Space Telescope became the centre of investigation amongst astronomers.
The images developed with the help of the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) from the Antofagasta region of the Atacama Desert in Chile, were published in Astronomy & Astrophysics journal, which is part of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.
According to researchers, the gas bubble radiates strongly polarized synchrotron emission, a type of non-thermal radiation generated by charged particles spiraling around magnetic field lines at almost the speed of light.
The overall features of the gas bubble could be captured in detail because of its emission model.
In an interview with Science Daily, Maciek Wielgus from Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, Germany, who led the study, said: “What is really new and interesting is that such flares were so far only clearly present in X-ray and infrared observations of Sagittarius A*. Here we see for the first time a very strong indication that orbiting hot spots are also present in radio observations.”
The study mentions the orbital radius of the gas bubble to be around 5 Schwarzschild radii, assuming that it is a Keplerian orbit. “We observe hints of a positive black hole spin, that is, a prograde hot spot motion.
Accounting for the rapidly varying rotation measure, we estimate the projected on-sky axis of the angular momentum of the hot spot to be ∼ 60ith a° east of north, w 180° ambiguity.
These results suggest that the accretion structure in Sagittarius A* is a magnetically arrested disk rotating clockwise,” the study added.
Earlier in May, NASA revealed the first images of the supermassive black hole situated at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy called Sagittarius A. Astronomers used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to try to decode why material around Sagittarius A had an extraordinarily faint X-ray profile.
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