Observation picture.
Observation picture. An international team, with the participation of the Universitat de València, has identified the signal of a bubble of hot gas orbiting in the vicinity of Sagittarius A* (the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy). The observation was made with the ALMA telescope (Atacama large mm/submm Array). The bubble orbited only a few light-minutes from the black hole, which may help to better understand how matter behaves in these enigmatic regions so close to the event horizon. "We were lucky that ALMA started observing Sagittarius A* just after an X-ray burst, caused by the heating of a gas bubble very close to the black hole," said Iván Martí Vidal, from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Universitat de València. "After calibrating the data with novel algorithms developed at the UV, we realised that we had detected an enigmatic signal related to that X-ray burst. It was an extraordinary experience," said the researcher.
