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Our Milky Way’s central black hole has a
leak!

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This supermassive black hole, over 4 million times more massive than our Sun,

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looks
like it still has the remnants of a blowtorch-like

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jet dating back several thousand years.

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NASA’s
Hubble Space Telescope hasn’t photographed the phantom jet yet,

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but it has helped find
circumstantial evidence that the jet is still

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pushing feebly into a huge hydrogen cloud.

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This is further evidence that the black hole
is not a sleeping monster, but periodically

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hiccups as stars and gas clouds fall into
it. The hiccup results in superheated material

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blasting away from the black hole as narrow
beams, or jets, shooting in the same direction

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as the black hole’s spin axis along with
a flood of ionizing radiation.

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As the jet blows through the gas, it hits
material, which creates a series of expanding

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bubbles that extend out to at least 500 light-years.

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The streams continue to percolate out of the

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Milky Way’s dense gas disk into the galactic
halo.

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Scientists concluded that this black hole
clearly surged in brightness by as much as

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1 millionfold in the last million years. That
would be enough for a jet to punch into the

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halo of material that surrounds the galaxy.

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This Hubble image of Galaxy NGC 1068, shows

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a similar scenario occurring.

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Previous observations by Hubble and other
telescopes found evidence that the Milky Way’s

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black hole had an outburst about 2-4 million
years ago that was energetic enough to create

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an immense pair of bubbles towering above
our galaxy that glow in gamma-rays.

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Hubble was used to see how fast the bubbles
were expanding and what they were made of.

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Hubble later found that the burst was so powerful
that it lit up a gaseous structure as far

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away as 200,000 light-years from the galactic
center.

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Called the Magellanic stream, seen here in pink,

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this gas is still glowing from
that event even today.

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The residual jet feature is close enough to
the black hole that it would become much more

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prominent only a few decades after the Milky
Way’s black hole powers up again.

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Whenever that does actually end up happening, it’s
sure to be quite a spectacular show!

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