Milky Way’s supermassive black hole exploded 3.5 million years ago: Study

Milky Way’s supermassive black hole exploded 3.5 million years ago: Study

TOPIC: Science & Tech

Context- The black hole, known as Sagittarius A, or Sgr A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star) — about 4.2 million times more massive than the Sun — exploded due to nuclear activity, according to a team of scientists at Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3-D).

Concept-

About Sagittarius A:

• It is at the center of the Milky Way galaxy which has four million times the mass of the sun.
• A supermassive black hole that sits 26,000 light-years away from Earth, near the Galactic Center, or the center of the Milky Way.
• It is one of the few black holes where we can witness the flow of matter nearby.

About Black Holes:

• Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects possessing gravitational pulls so powerful even light cannot escape them.
• It refers to a point in space where the matter is so compressed as to create a gravity field from which even light cannot escape.
• The concept was theorized by Albert Einstein in 1915 and the term ‘black hole’ was coined in the mid-1960s by American physicist John Archibald Wheeler.
• The black holes belong to two categories:
  • One category ranges between a few solar masses and tens of solar masses. These are thought to form when massive stars die.
  • The other category is of supermassive black holes. These range from hundreds of thousands to billions of times that of the sun from the Solar system to which Earth belongs.