Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Telescope have discovered an "exhaust vent attached to a “chimney” of hot gas blowing away from the center of the Milky Way galaxy," according to the Chandra team.
Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart
Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart
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00:00visit chandra's beautiful universe galactic center exhaust vent using nasa's chandra x-ray
00:11observatory astronomers have located an exhaust vent attached to a chimney of hot gas blowing
00:18away from the center of the milky way galaxy the chimney and vent are about 26 000 light years from
00:25earth the chimney begins at the center of the galaxy and stands perpendicular to the milky way's
00:32spiral disk the research team thinks that eruptions from the supermassive black hole at the milky way's
00:39center called sagittarius a star or sag a star for short may have created this chimney and exhaust
00:47vent previously other astronomers had found a structure in x-ray data from chandra and xmm
00:55newton that seemed to be acting as a chimney moving hot gas away from the center of the galaxy
01:02this latest result shows this hot gas escaping into the rest of the galaxy the new chandra data reveals
01:09what astronomers think are the walls of a cylindrical tunnel that is pumping hot gas into the milky way
01:15about 700 light years away from sag a star the researchers think this hot gas is being driven
01:21upwards when material gets dumped onto sag a star and causes eruptions it's too early to tell just how
01:27often sag a star is being fed is this energy and heat stoked by a large amount of material being dumped
01:34onto sag a star at once like a bunch of logs being dumped on a fire at once or does it come from multiple
01:40small loads being fed into the black hole similar to kindling being regularly tossed in future observations
01:48may provide answers in the meantime the discovery of this exhaust vent might point astronomers to the
01:55origin of two mysterious and much larger structures around the center of the milky way the fermi bubbles
02:02seen in gamma rays by nasa's fermi gamma ray space telescope and the irisita bubbles detected by isa's
02:08newest x-ray telescope both of these are pairs of structures extending thousands of light years away
02:16from the center of the galaxy chandra continues to show how fascinating and complex the center of our milky way
02:24the center of the milky way galaxy is