Australian and U.S. researchers have discovered that the supermassive
black hole at the center of the Milky Way is more active than previously
thought and sometimes explosively so.
It may well be that millions of years ago, early hominids looked up at
the night sky and could see cones of light shooting sideways from the
Milky Way, brighter than any star in the night sky.
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Originally Posted by Joss Bland-Hawthorn Director, Sydney Institute for Astronomy, University of Sydney
The supermassive black hole at the heart of our Galaxy spat out an enormous flare of radiation 3.5 million years ago that would have been clearly visible from Earth.
In new research that will soon be published in the Astrophysical Journal my colleagues and I found that the flare left traces in a trail of gas called the Magellanic Stream that lies some 200,000 light years away and encircles the Milky Way.
The team includes Ralph Sutherland and Brent Groves at the Australian National University and ASTRO-3D; Magda Guglielmo, Wen Hao Li and Andrew Curzons at the University of Sydney; Philip Maloney at the University of Colorado; Gerald Cecil at the University of Carolina; and Andrew J. Fox at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
The discovery changes our view of our galaxy’s central black hole, which has appeared dormant throughout recorded human history. Astronomers are coming to realise that it has been hugely active, even explosive, in the relatively recent past in galactic terms (measured in millions of years).
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Originally Posted by Joss Bland-Hawthorn Director, Sydney Institute for Astronomy, University of Sydney
Some three million years ago, our direct ancestor Australopithecus afarensis walked the Earth. They may well have looked up towards Sagittarius and seen cones of light shooting sideways from the Milky Way, brighter than any star in the night sky.
The lightshow would have appeared as static beams on a human timescale, only flickering on timescales of thousands of years. Today, the only visible remnant of that immensely powerful event is the cooling gas along the distant Magellanic Stream.
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Story and videos here :-
https://theconversation.com/a-dorman...thought-124696
