At the centre of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*. It is roughly 27,000 light years from Earth and 23.5 million kilometres in diameter. In a world first, a team of astronomers led by Florian Peißker from the University of Cologne, Germany, have discovered a binary star system orbiting this black hole. The system is known as D9. Its discovery, announced in a new paper published today in Nature Communications, sheds light on the extreme environment at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. It also helps explain a long-running cosmic mystery about why some…
Author: Luke Barnes, Lecturer in Physics, Western Sydney University
The largest known black hole jets, 23 million light years across, have been discovered in the distant universe. This pair of particle beams launched by a supermassive black hole is over a hundred times larger than our galaxy, the Milky Way. In 2022, we announced the discovery of one of the largest black hole jets in the night sky, launched from a (relatively) nearby galaxy called NGC2663. Using CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) in Western Australia, we confirmed that NGC2663’s jet is one of the largest in the sky. In other words, it appears to be the largest…