Supermassive black hole in the Milky Way has a ‘leak’, Nasa says

A hydrogen cloud is being pushed out by outflowing jets, in the same direction as the black hole’s magnetic fields

The black hole at the centre of the Milky Way has a ‘leak’, according to Nasa.

The space agency has not yet managed to capture the “phantom jet” but there is evidence that it is pushing into a huge hydrogen cloud “like the narrow stream from a hose aimed into a pile of sand.”

Rather than a dormant goliath, the supermassive black hole draws material into a swirling accretion disk. Some of the material that falls in is swept up into outflowing jets in the same direction as the hole’s huge magnetic fields.

Researchers suggest that these jets are produced every time it swallows a large object, like a gas cloud. Using the telescope at the ALMA Observatory in Chile to view millimetre wavelengths, an expanding, narrow line of molecular gas was found that can be traced back at least 15 light-years back to the black hole.

This discovery then led the researchers to a glowing, inflated bubble of hot gas 35 light-years away from the black hole, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

"The streams percolate out of the Milky Way’s dense gas disk," said Alex Wagner of Tsukuba University in Japan. "The jet diverges from a pencil beam into tendrils, like that of an octopus." This can create a series of expanding bubbles that extend at least 500 light-years out.

"Our central black hole clearly surged in luminosity at least one millionfold in the last million years. That sufficed for a jet to punch into the Galactic halo”, Mr Wagner added.

The black hole had a large outburst between two and four million years ago with enough energy to create a pair of glowing bubbles above our galaxy. These were discovered in 2010 and 2003.