Unknown Regular Activity Found At The Black Hole At The Center Of Our Galaxy

Mexican scientists have detected activity near the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, which is considered a quiet object.

Several years ago, scientists discovered periodic flashes in the X-ray range that came to us from the direction of the black hole Sagittarius A*. Astrophysicists Gustavo Magallanes-Guijón and Sergio Mendoza from the National Autonomous University of Mexico decided to take a closer look at this issue and turned to open data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Orbital Telescope. Scientists analyzed 180 days of telescope recordings from June 22 to December 19, 2022.

Analysis consisted of processing and searching for patterns, especially those that appear periodically. As a result, they found one of them. It turned out that from the vicinity of Sagittarius A* with a reliability of 3 sigma (for an “iron” confirmation of the discovery, a reliability of at least 5σ is required) every 76.32 minutes a gamma signal arrives. There is a high probability that a clump of gas rotates around the black hole in the center of the Milky Way at a distance approximately like Mercury from the Sun at a speed of about 30% of the speed of light.

Perhaps in the future Sagittarius A* will show itself even more clearly, but at the moment it is only hinting at its activity.