The gas feeding the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy may be getting "cooked" before being consumed, scientists claim.
The observation comes from the Herschel space observatory, which has detected unusually hot gas that may be circling around or falling toward the black hole. Herschel is operated by the European Space Agency with assistance from NASA.
"The black hole appears to be devouring the gas," said Paul Goldsmith, the U.S. project scientist for Herschel at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This will teach us about how supermassive black holes grow."
Herschel's far-infrared wavelengths allow for the close study of Sagittarius A, the region of our galaxy where the black hole is located. Typical interstellar clouds usually measure a few tens of degrees above absolute zero. At least some of the recent measures, however, indicate gas temperatures of 1,832 degrees Farenheit.
"Herschel has resolved the far-infrared emission within just one light-year of the black hole, making it possible for the first time at these wavelengths to separate emission due to the central cavity from that of the surrounding dense molecular disc," lead author Javier Goicoechea of the Centro de Astrobiología, Spain, said.
According to the research team, the high temperatures could largely be derived from emissions from strong shocks in highly magnetized gas. The region will be monitored with instruments such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) for X-ray emissions, as the black hole gobbles up the cosmic gas.
