Our Milky Way Galaxy has a bizarre supermassive black hole at its center, spinning rapidly and misaligned with the rest of the galaxy.
According to Live Science, an international research team has recently uncovered the reason why the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) appears to be “lost” compared to the rest of the Milky Way.
Sagittarius A* is a colossal tear in space-time, classified as a supermassive black hole – often referred to as a bizarre black hole – immense in the universe.
It has a mass equivalent to 4 million suns and a diameter of about 23.5 million kilometers.
The monstrous heart of the Milky Way is the result of two giant black holes merging – (AI Illustration: ANH THƯ).
In the new study, scientists discovered that behind its enormous size is the merger of two supermassive black holes: the Sgr A* we observe today was born from a catastrophic merger with another giant black hole billions of years ago.
Due to the scale of this merger, even after billions of years, the monstrous heart of the Milky Way still hasn’t fully synchronized with the rest of the galaxy.
“This discovery paves the way for our understanding of how supermassive black holes grow and evolve,” said Yihan Wang, the lead author of the study and an astrophysicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).
According to Dr. Wang, the high misalignment of Sagittarius A* reveals the details of the merger. This impact significantly altered the amplitude and spin direction of the original black hole.
The merging of black hole cores represents the final stage of a galactic merger.
Our Milky Way, which belongs to the group of monstrous galaxies, has grown by devouring approximately 20 other galaxies, as evidenced by the bumps and dips on its main disk and the unusual behavior of certain stars…
Professor Bing Zhang from UNLV, a co-author of the study, noted that they also calculated that the merger of these two black holes started 9 billion years ago and was the result of the famous merger between the Milky Way and the Gaia-Enceladus galaxy, one of the earliest and most violent mergers.
