Flares from Infinity: Sagittarius A* Part 2

the Milky Way galaxy. Yeah, this is uh so, so, as we mentioned in the last episode, we had what three episodes we've done previously just on black holes in general, and in these two episodes deal with supermassive black holes more specifically. Uh and uh yeah, So if you're listening to this episode, you do need to have at least

listened to the previous supermassive black hole episode. But I think the supermassive black hole episodes are are are tailored to stand on their own without necessarily having listened to the previous black hole episodes. In either case, it is recommended that you have seen either Walt Disney's The black Hole or Event Horizon, so they have a proper basis for all of our terrible jokes. Which one of those

two is more kid friendly? You think, Oh, blow. I think it's the Disney movie, but the Disney movie is also surprisingly dark. Like, uh, Anthony Perkins is eviscerated by a killer robot um Like this is awful scene where Maximilian the robots coming at him with the spinning blade arm and he holds up like a giant dictionary to block it, and he like cuts right through the dictionary and uh and you know, apparently like just disembowels Anthony Perkins.

It cuts out the definition of in trails. Well you don't see any in trails, but it's still pretty horrific. There's some scary moments in it. But I loved it as a kid. I really need to sit down and watch it again. Now, speaking of a visceration, we're gonna be talking about some somewhat violent events going on around a black hole, or at least they presumed black hole today.

And one thing we promised you last time is that we would answer a few questions every You've always wanted to know about the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, but we're afraid to ask. And one of the questions people most often ask about black holes. If you're ready to jump right in robert Is. With this big supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, will the rest of the Milky Way, including Earth, one day gets sucked into this black hole? And I

was trying to find a good answer for this. I think the short answer is no, or at least that's not a given. All evidence indicates that, of course, the Milky Way does have this supermassive black hole at its center. The galaxy is sort of orbiting around it, or at least roughly orbiting around it, But our Solar system is in a stable orbit that is pretty far out. It's

something like light years away from the galactic center. And black holes, even unbelievably giant black holes, still basically behave like stars until you get really close to them. They're not vacuum cleaners just sucking down the entire universe. You know. They're objects traveling through space with a gravitational attraction that is a product of their mass and your distance from them, and like other objects, if you're far enough away, they're

gravitational attraction is negligible. So we've got no indication that there is a risk of a black hole swallowing our Solar system or the Earth or the rest of the Milky Way. But of course, if anything as massive as a black hole pass near our Solar system, I think, I mean that that would be a problem. It might not swallow our Solar System, but it's gravitational influence could

alter the orbits of the planets, which would be not good. Obviously, life on Earth depends very heavily on us being where we are relative to the Sun and other objects in the Solar System staying where they are. You don't want to say the orbits of comets and other objects like that thrown out of whack, because then that can lead

to interplanetary bombardment. Yeah. I think the fact that a black hole is an object is something that we do have to come back to again and again because especially with science fiction treatments, especially those especially the Disney black Hole. So you know, there's this idea of like thinking of it as a whirlpool it's a hungry, hungry hippo, yeah, or thinking of it as a tunnel or just an open like some of these you know, these analogies. They

they may be useful to a certain extent. It gives us something to picture in our mind, but it kind of drifts away from the idea that this is an object. This is a highly dense thing, and now, of course in the region really close to it, it doesn't behave like most other objects too. But once once you get farther away, I would say that the ways in which it is unique become less relevant to you. Does that

make sense? Yes? Now, Um, you touched on some of this, but but I was looking around like, Okay, what is the scenario in which the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy uh could conceivably destroy us? And that there is one very strong possibility. So and we've mentioned that our system is again in a stable orbit around the galactic center. Um, we're not being pooled pulled into Sagittarius M A star. But in four point five billion years, the Milky Way galaxy will likely merge with

the Andromeda galaxy. And when this happens, all bets are off. It's possible that everything gets pushed around, gets shuffled around, and our solar system then could be gulped up or just hideously disrupted by Sagittarius A star in the process. This, according to Fabio Pacucci, b Hi Fellow at Harvard University and Clay Fellow at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He has

a wonderful ted Ed video about this. So if you just go to if you go to YouTube and you look up, just look up ted Ed in general, because they're great educational short form videos to watch with the entire family. We watch them all the time in my household. But they have an extra excellent one about black holes

that Fabio is the contributor for. Yeah, now, when we talk about the collision of galaxies, maybe someday we could do a whole episode just on the upcoming collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy because yeah, so

they're on a collision course. Uh. On one hand, that sounds like, okay, so that's just the end of everything, right, Actually, I think not necessarily, because you have to remember, well, you know there is a lot of space in between stars, right, you know, there's there's a lot of space for things to go by. But one of the big fears I think is not necessarily that like Earth will smash directly into a star from Andromeda or something. That the fear

is about gravitational disruption. Right, things moving past each other in space can still have a perturbation effects on on stars, on the planet's orbiting stars, on the objects and junk

in space all around stars. Well, none of that's good. Yeah, I mean it's kind of like, and this is a terrible analogy, I'm sure, but it's like, if two companies merge, your your concern is not that, you know, if you're an editor at one company and you emerge with another company, you're not concerned that there's another editor over there that you're just going to smack into so hard that you both explode. No, you're worried about redundancies. You're worried about

reshuffling of titles and priorities, etcetera. Which you know, all of that can be can can certainly be catastrophically disruptive to your life. Um, but you're not worried about, you know, like physically, you know, exploding or you know, melting into them like Ron Silver and time coop. So I guess that is possible. I mean, whenever things drift past each other in space, there's always a potential for a collision. It's just you know that that's not necessarily the thing

you should be worried about. I think the bigger thing would be, Yeah, do you get thrown out of place? You get thrown in? You getting thrown into the near orbit or towards the black hole would obviously be bad and and catastrophic in its own right for sure. Alright, So the next big question that that you might be wondering about. Could intelligent life forms live of and or operate in orbit around a supermassive black hole, specifically our

supermassive black hole? Uh? You know, how would this factor into a like a galactic civilization? Yeah? Or in the in the galaxy center more generally, right, can you get close to the galaxy center and have life there? This seems debatable, right, Like, So there are some scientists who think that just the way solar systems have a habitable zone for planetary orbits, the galaxy as a whole has

some kind of habitable zone for star systems. Now in star systems, of course, this habitable zone has temperature as a primary variable, right, And this depends on the radiation coming off of the parent star and how far away that planet is from the star. So if your planet is too close it's too hot to have liquid water, you'd be something like mercury, or could be a hot gas planet too far away, it's too cold to have

liquid water. You might be like Jupiter or Saturn, And it's generally believed that liquid water is sort of a prerequisite for life, or at least the kind of life that we understand. Could it be the galaxies as a whole have zones kind of like this where life is statistically more likely to emerge, thrive, and survive than in other zones of the galaxy. Some scientists have proposed this. And if that is the case, what characterizes this zone? Uh?

First of all, if the proponents of the idea of a galactic hapitable zone are correct, the zone of the galaxy most suitable for life would tend to be a sort of wide ring around the center of the galaxy, so not farther out in the galactic halo, not not way out there, but also not deep in the middle near the galactic center. Now, why would this region be potentially better to live in than say, the galactic center. Uh?

Just the short and basic version of your main consideration here would be first of all, conditions that give rise to life, and then the conditions that can sustain life. So to give rise to life, we assume you need first of all, terrestrial planets with stable orbits, right, and and this means solar systems with a moderate amount of

metal in them. If you've got a solar system that's like mostly hydrogen and doesn't have much that looks like it could turn into rocky terrain, that probably means you're not going to have life forms at least as we understand them. But this isn't the primary concern for our question. Uh. A big one for our question would be conditions that can sustain life, Like how often or how intensely would a planet in a given region be subjected to outside

damaging influences. Examples of this could be radiation from violent nearby phenomena their stars. Uh, you know, violent things going on Obviously nearby supernova would be a huge problem. If a star anywhere near I you goes supernova, it will blast your planet and could potentially sterilize it. Uh. The near passage of of other massive objects like stars or black holes is a huge issue that could potentially disturb planetary orbits or bring about a bombardment of terrestrial planets

by comets and other junk from space. So like, if something passes through your Solar System, and it's really heavy. It will disturb these commetary orbits and then suddenly, you know, things that haven't been hitting your planet for a long time suddenly are This even makes me think about the

Lisa Randall dark matter and the dinosaurs hypothesis. I can't remember if we ever talked about that on the show, but basically her idea was that, you know, it's possible that, uh, some extinction events in Earth's history are correlated to Earth's passage through a region of the galactic plane where dark matter is concentrated, and the extra gravitational influence of that dark matter along that plane, uh disturbs the orbits of some objects in the Solar System and makes you know,

the Earth get bombarded by stuff or maybe influences. I can't remember. I think it was mainly comments she was talking about, but maybe it was also vulcanism. I didn't actually read the book, but I remember reading articles about it when it came out. It seemed interesting. Maybe we'll have to come back and take a look at that someday. Yeah, that sounds frightening. I don't know whether that theory is widely believed to to you know, have credence or not.

But but generally, if something disturbs the gravitational field of your of your star system, that can be really bad for anything living there. Yes, and so there are a lot of variables at play, but generally these kinds of dangerous conditions, like being subjected to more intense or more frequent radiation or radiation events, and more more frequent disturbances of gravity by large objects, that's going to be more likely in densely packed regions of a galaxy, like closer

to the galactic center. The higher the density of nearby stars and other stuff, the more dangerous there are. And a very crude analogy is you're more likely to have some kind of auto accident or mishap on a busy city street than on some empty country road. Right, Yeah, they're just well there's you know, there's just more going on there. But then again, I do want to say it seems like a lot of the writing about galactic

habitable zones is subject to ongoing criticism and dispute. Uh, it does seem clear that there are at least some risks to life associated with moving closer to the galactic center. But you know where exactly this habitable zone of a galaxy would be if it in fact is true that some regions of the galaxy or on average more habitable than others. I think that's highly disputed. So this is not settled science. Alright, We're gonna take a quick break.

When we come back, we have a little more information about just how chaotic and destructive uh, the inner reaches of the galaxy seem to be, and then we'll move on to some other possibilities for uh, extraterrestrial activity in

the inner galaxy. All right, we're back, all right, So we were just talking about this question of like, could you, you know, could you tend to find life for intelligent life forms in orbit around a central supermassive black hole in our galaxy or in the galactic center more generally, would you expect to see something like that? Would it be a survivable region? And and it uh, it seems like this is not fully settled, but we were discussing

some potential risks of living in the galactic center. Yes, I was looking around for some more details on this, and this brought me as questions like this often due to Centauri Dreams, which is a wonderful space website and I was reading a blog post by the writer Paul Gilster of The Planetary Society, in which he looks to the work of Sergey n Action at Leicester on the idea that the doughnut shaped dust clouds obscuring half of supermassive black holes might be the you know, the result

of crashes between planets and asteroids occurring at a thousand kilometers per second speeds, pounding everything into micros copic dust. So it's a realm of you know, of a violent collision high radiation. But he points out that while those planets are doomed, you know anything, actually any of the planets actually in that region or potentially doomed, the resulting dust blocks harmful radiation from all of this chaos from reaching the rest of the galaxy, the host galaxy. That's interesting.

I mean, yeah, we were talking in the last episode about how dust clouds obscure the galactic center from our point of view, like it's harder to do astronomy looking towards the galactic center. I mean, I would imagine that brightness has something to do with it. But also, yeah, the dust blocks our view and does significant dimming. It causes many magnitudes of extinction to the sources coming from

that direction. But we do have methods of looking that way now, and we can do astronomy focused on the center of the galaxy, I think, you know, due to stuff like looking at infrared and X rays. I was also looking around, uh and found some writings on this from Phil Plate of Bad Astronomy, always a great read on space related topics, and he points out in some galaxies called active galaxies, gas and dust fall into the yawning black hole at the center of the galaxy, forming

a disc of material sometimes hundreds of light years across. Again, this here is going to be a realm of high temperatures, high radiation, and intense light that outshines the rest of the galaxy, and that would mirror some of the phenomenon we were talking about in the last episode, where yeah, like you've got like this quasar or something super powerful in the middle of the galaxy that just sort of like you know, it sort of is the galaxy, right,

But fortunately, the Milky Way galaxy is not an active galaxy. It's a quiescent galaxy, so it's not quite the cosmic forge we find in other galaxies where you know, it's just super intense. It is to a certain extent slumbering, and we're able. I mean, I keep coming back to the idea of their just being like an awful, all powerful eldric deity the center of the cosmos, and we're just lucky that it's that we're in a cosmos. It's a little worn out and take in a lengthy slumber.

I think at the end of the last episode you Were, You Were, you sort of fought against the idea of thinking of black I know, I don't want to think of a black hole as being you know, and this has his off figure, but it's hard and it's hard not to when we used to read things like this. So I guess we've been looking at answers for mostly like no, we're looking at the idea of the inner galaxy is a place where you're probably not encountering um,

you know, planets where life is evolved. There. There are a lot of risks in the galactic center because you know, the things are more densely packed. There's probably more radiation risk, probably more gravity disturbance risk. But at the same time there are more stars. You might just get more chances for things to evolve there. So it's it's like I was saying, it's not settled science, but you can point to some things going on there and say it looks

like there are are risky phenomena near the galactic center. Now, indeed, if we are dealing with habitable zones and uh, you know, uninhabitable zones of the galaxy, one thing to keep in mind is that technology can potentially change things. Like just look to our solar system. Yes, Earth is the like

it's it's the bowl of porridge. That's just right. But we've discussed on the show plenty of times that you know, there are plans, there are ideas and concepts where with sufficient technology, humans could live on Mars, they could live in the clouds of Venus. Even here on Earth we have a neutrino observatory at the South Pole. You know, we've got or at least yeah, deepen Antarctica. That's not

a place that's inhabitable by mammals. So you know, so like we we have found technological ways of overcoming the environmental limitations imposed by the universe. And you can see that even without us leaving our host planet. So you know, if you can build a research station on the South Pole, where no mammal like us should be able to survive if you can potentially build it. Oh, if you can build an I. S. S. Yeah, and live out in space.

Yeah you can imagine. Okay, just extra appellate that up. However, many orders of magnitude of whatever scale you're talking about to our power to live beyond our original organic means. Yea. So we have to come back to something we've discussed in the show before, sort of a propose technological ladder to um to godhood if you will. The Cardassie of scale an old favorite. Yes, so you got you got.

Basically you've got type one, Type two, and type three, and you know, I've also seen people discuss the possibility of the type four. But a Type four is so far beyond where we are now it's almost not even worth thinking about. Well, I'd say even like type three is hard to imagine what that would look like. Uh, you know, we've got more like science fiction that kind of deals on the realm of one and two. Yeah,

so we're not even type ones yet. Time close. Yeah, Type A Type one civilization, the cardassi of scale should be capable of harnessing all the energy of their planet, because basically that's what the scale is about. It's about, you know, civilization's ability to to harness in yeah, to take what's there in the universe and turn that into the ability to do work. Now, of course that doesn't

necessarily mean work, like it's hard to do. That could be you know, operating the video game systems of the future or whatever to turn it into usable energy. Right. Yeah. So so again we're not type one yet. If we could harness all the power, all the energy of our planet, we would be type one. The next step is is a is a type two in which a civilization has become masters of their own star, essentially solar solar system level power. And then that type three, which is an

an enormous step. Then from from from step to tow a step three civilization has the power of an entire galaxy at its disposal. That's hard to imagine, it is, It is very difficult to imagine it. It It gets so difficult to imagine it's almost ridiculous to try and think of what is beyond that, you know, uh, and and so most of our contemplations deal with one, two and three.

Most deal with one and two. So level one and two on the Kardaship scale would theoretically have access to technology we refer to as a Dyson sphere, named for theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, and these are essentially means of surrounding a power source and harvesting all of its energy. There are different varieties of this. You don't need to necessarily think of a hard sphere, um though I love too because it should pops up in that episode of Star Trek. But it could also be you know, more

like a dice in cloud. It could be you know, satellites surrounding something and absorbing its energy. Um. So it's maybe oversimplified, but the classic example would be just surrounding the Sun with something like solar panels, so you get all of the energy out of it. You can just sort of like release the waste exhaust outside and and use everything the sun can give you. Yeah, the still suits of Dune are sort of like Dyson spheres for

human sweat, you know, for human moisture. Don't waste to drop. So how does this tie into supermassive black hole old holes? You might wonder, Well, I was reading a very interesting paper. Uh, this is from a two thousand and eleven edition of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. And this is by an o U and you Ku titled Type three Dicen sphere of highly advanced civilizations around a supermassive black hole. Uh So, I'm gonna read a quick quote from this quote.

A society of a highly advanced civilization is supposed to require a huge amount of energy to operate the social system. As the gravitational energy released by the accretion of matter into a supermassive black hole is huge, a system must be developed to use this energy. In such a society, the condition around a supermassive black hole at the center of a of a galaxy would be more efficient both in extracting energy and exhausting the waste energy for advanced

civilizations than those of a Dicen sphere. So basically they're arguing, like, hey, like we've touched on before, there's a lot going on on at the center of the galaxy. There's a lot of energy at the center of the galaxy. Any sufficiently advanced civilization would go where the energy is and presumably have the technology to harness it right, extract that energy and do something with it rather than letting it just

turn into radiation and in space. Yeah. So yeah. They point out that a huge amount of radiation energy generates in close vicinity to a supermassive black hole, and here, you know, this accretion disc rotates around it, so the potential energy of the accreting matter releases to form a

hot and dense disk. Sorry, I was just for a moment trying to imagine what we would do with it, and it would be like, I, let's load up, you know, ten billion spaceships full of coal and take them to the center of the galaxy and let the supermassive black hole burn the coal and then we can use the heat from the cold power. So yeah, that's our solution. Uh yeah, that's not quite the system that that that

they're proposing. Here, this is what they add quote, radiation from the accretion disk will be collected by a mirror system as a type three dycen sphere. Waste material and energy could be thrown off towards the central supermassive black hole, and the supermassive black hole would be the final reservoir

for all the waste materials for any civilizations. Thus, the most advanced civilizations would develop their activities using a supermassive black hole efficiency, putting the power plants around the supermassive black hole at the center of their home galaxy. Wow, well, I mean that's pretty out there. Yeah, that that's interesting. Yeah. So from here they lay out a power plant system that amounts to a sort of Dyson's sphere or shell.

The energy from the power plants is then transferred by electromagnetic waves the habitats of advanced civilizations, which would be as imagining more sustainable, stable regions. And then these transmissions would also serve would serve as a power grid, but also as highways, four vessels, uh, you know, more or less sailing them as if they were sailing, you know, the solar wind. So putting power plants on a supermassive black hole, well, well, not quite on, but close to.

And then they touched on that to uh you know, basically asking asking answering the question how close would these power plants be. Yeah, they say that considering Sagittarius a star, that the closest you would be dealing with the closest distance, the closest orbit would be six hundred r s. That's a swords child radius, and uh, they say that the proper area for the power plants and their model would be around one hundred three to one hundred four r

s is um. Also basically just like a hundred of the radius of the black hole region itself out And that sounds frighteningly close. But then again, conceivably this would be a civilization that assuming they're not entirely technological by this point, you know, and they even have any kind of like you know, a physical remainder in their their their being and their culture. Again, it's difficult to imagine some of these civilizations with him they could consist of.

But even if they were in some way organic, still like, surely this would be the domain of robots that they send out, sending the robots in to do the hard work at the center and then being that energy back to the centers of civilization. I feel so two ways about this, because on one hand, it's like, I love the idea of people trying to work out how CARDASHEV

level three power plants would work out would function. But on the other hand, it's just like, we don't even we're not even you know, level one yet, So you you have to imagine that even if these authors are totally on the right track, there's probably a lot of details we haven't we haven't really faced yet and and don't really know how to incorporate. But at the same time, this is this is such a blessed project, trying to eagine. All right, maybe like a billion years in the future,

what does what does the civilization do to get their power? Yeah? I love I love papers like this. Now, now to be clear again, this is all theoretical and it's something the authors say we might look for, but there's no evidence that something like this is actually going on anywhere in the universe. Okay, So this is another example, as has often been done before, where working out the details of a potential uh Dyson sphere type project would be

mostly useful in the search for extraterrestrial life. Right, right, What would be the signatures of this type of technology? Do we look out into the universe and see anything like that? Right? And and and Astronomers have observed objects that could potentially be explained by dimming due to a

Dyson sphere. For instance, in two thousand and sixteen, scientists observed a dimming of the star Epic to zero four to seven eight, nine one six that was out of keeping with a large planet, you know, passing between us. And they presented a few possible explanations, but the last of them was a dicense fhere, because there's always aliens, should always be the last explanation we turned to, no matter how exciting that explanation might be. But which of

their potential explanations made the headlines? Well, of course it's the dicense fhere right. In fact, I think one of the headlines I was looking at was researchers just found a second dicense fhere star, What what happened to the first one? That's brilliant? Well, I mean, like, like I said, there have been at least a couple of cases where people have seen something and they're like, we don't really fully understand what it is, but here a list of

things it could be. And yeah, number three or four or five is sometimes a dicense here. Yeah. Um, I just like that. It sounds like it was assumed that the first one they found actually is a license fhere, and not just like there's an off chance that it could be and that would be consistent with what we saw.

All right. On that note, We're gonna take one more break, but when we come back, we have some more mysteries to consider, not about uh, you know, hypothetical you know, super advanced technological societies, but rather mysteries concerning the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Thank all right, we're back. Now it's time to talk about how our own galaxy supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A star has been showing some weird and mysterious behavior lately, just just in

the past few years or this year. Yeah, that's right. NASA Schandra X ray Observatory has observed a mysterious daily flares from Sagittarius A Star, and it leads us to, you know, wonder what's going on? Um so. One theory is that the dust cloud around it contains comments and asteroids stripped away from other stars, and then when collisions occur,

it's sometimes sends one off into Sagittarius A Star. And according to a NASA report from two thousand twelve, quote, if the asteroid passes within about one million miles of the black hole, roughly the distance between the Earth the Sun, it would be torn to pieces by the tidal forces from the black hole. So basically, you know, you're just ripping apart a huge chunk of metal or rock in space, right, and this produces a flare as the asteroid than as

the pieces of it consumed by the black hole. Comets have been observed to impact our Sun with almost identical frequency uh and with a resulting flare. You can even get a really cool flare in astronomy just looking at like Jupiter. Have you seen some of these when like a comet goes into Jupiter. Yeah, amazing. Now there have been other recent observations of of big flare ups right. Yeah. In May nineteen, a sizeable flare was was observed by a team using the CAT ten meter telescope, and this

was in the near infrared range. There they're also variable blasts from Sagittarius a star, and other frequencies like the X ray range. This was the brightest flare we've ever observed in the infrared or near infrared. In fact, according to the u c l A astronomer Twine Doe, who was the lead researcher on these uh, these latest latest radiation bursts are our telescopes only caught the tail end of the flare. It was probably much brighter right before

we started looking at it. Yeah, as Phil Play reported in Bad Astronomy, the flare was well over two thousand times more luminous than the Sun in the infrared. Right. But yeah, and and furthermore, the scientists judged it to be basically a one and two thousand occurrence compared to two past observed fluctuations. Right, so it's probably not just a random fluctuation in the brightness of the radio source

there it is. It is a an event, right. So this led researchers who think it might be tied to a star known as S two, which regularly makes a super close pass by the supermassive black hole. Uh, super close, you know, in astronomical terms. But in doing so, it drags a kind of wind of particles with it. Well, I think the star puts out a stellar wind, just

like our sun does. Yeah, and and but then there in their particles within that wind, And so it could be that that wind of particles is crashing into the black hole. Uh. They considered this, but they decided, well, I don't I don't think this would be strong enough thing to actually make that flare. So another possibility, though, is that S two's pass disturbed clouds of gas and

caused them to fall into the black hole. It's also possible that an unknown object known as G two on a two hundred and sixty year orbit around the black hole might have caused such a you know, in an area of gas to fall into it. You know, it moved close enough. In fact, it moved close enough that you have G two itself were a dust cloud, as some have thought it might be, it would have just

fallen in. But we don't know for sure exactly what G two is, right, right, I thought it was maybe gas or dust, but it didn't behave like that when it went by the supermassive black holes. Right, there's at least one idea that it could be a star. There could be a star in the middle of a of a cloud of of of of gas and or a particle, etcetera. And the or it could be two stars that have merged due to their you know, proximity to the black hole and then blow they end up blowing off dust

in the process. Okay, So if there's a star within it, that would explain like gravity holding it sort of together when goes by the black hole. Yeah, there's something strong inside it, or the flare could just be due to an asteroid or come it stripped away from a star system falling into the black hole. That's that's always a possibility that's discussed as well. You know. One of the sad things about trying to look at the center of the galaxy is that sometimes the Sun gets in the way.

Like our our viewing window is limited because the Sun passes between the Earth and Sagittarius at a you know, a certain time each year. Also along the same lines of mysteries dealing with Sagittarius a star, I was reading an article from just a couple of days ago about weird observations regarding what are called Fermi bubbles and Sagittarius a star. This was on space dot com, authored by

the Ohio State astrophysicist Paul im Sutter. Uh So, Okay, what you've got here are two giant bubbles of stuff including hot gas and cosmic rays, and they're globbing onto the middle of the galaxy, of the Milky Way galaxy. And we can see these bubbles are emitting high frequency

radiation like gamma rays and X rays. They were discovered in two thousand ten by researchers working with the Fermi gamma ray space telescope, and they extend out vertically from the flat axis of the galaxy to a distance of roughly twenty five tho light years in each direction. So if you're trying to picture this and you're picturing the disc of the galaxy as a vinyl record, imagine a balloon tied to the middle of the record, like the hole in the middle of the record on each side,

and this will give you an idea. So, these huge blobs of stuff are referred to as Fermi bubbles, But what are they and how do they get there? Well? An interesting development is that more recently, the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory and in Antarctica has observed high energy neutrinos blasting directly from these bubbles, indicating that perhaps, in in Sutter's words quote, some crazy sub atomic interactions are afoot.

He writes that the position of these bubbles right above and below the center of the galaxy could point to their origin, and that would be the supermassive black hole. Of course, Sagittary essay star Now, like what could have happened, that's not really known. He supposes maybe millions of years ago, something significant fell into the black hole quote with the infalling material heating up, twisting around in a complicated dance of electric and magnetic forces, and managing to escape the

clutches of the event horizon before falling in. That material energized beyond belief, raced away from the center of the galaxy, riding on jets of particles accelerated to nearly a speed of light as they fled to safety. These particles spread and thinned out, but maintained their energetic state to the

present day. So maybe we've got these gigantic, almost galaxy sized bubbles reaching out of the top and bottom in the milky way that it looks very possibly like something fell or almost fell into the black hole and created these. So possibly a star got too close, was torn apart and ejected by the gravitational forces, or maybe many of the stars in the dense core of the galaxy all went supernova around the same time. This created this highly energetic stuff to get ejected out in these these polar

jets from the black hole. But anyway, it created these bubbles that are full of all this high energy stuff that's still ejecting neutrinos today, and you know, that's exactly the kind of thing that would interest be very interesting to uh type two civilization or a type three. Uh. Yeah, well, I guess at this point we've we've come to the end of the episode, uh, and come to the end of this uh this two episode exploration of Sagittarius a

star and supermassive black holes in general. But obviously we'd love to hear from everybody out there. Um. You know, obviously nobody has personal experience with a supermassive black hole, but we would love I'm always happy to hear from uh. You know, some of our listeners are have read a quite a lot of science fiction, and even they've read science fiction that I have not read and you haven't read.

So I love to hear anytime, you know, someone's like, hey, I actually I know a science fiction novel that or a short story that deals with exactly that concept, and here's their solution to it. Oh. But we also know from past listener mail that we have listeners in astrobiology, astronomy and astrophysics. If you've got something to add to this topic, please get in touch absolutely uh. In the meantime, you can find all the episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

You can find our other show, Invention and Invention Pod dot com. Uh yeah. If you're looking for another episode of per week from from the two of us, consider Invention. Each each episode is a different invention and it you know it is essentially an invention by invention exploration of human techno history. Uh And if you want to support either show, really the best thing you can do is make sure you've subscribed, and wherever you get get our shows, just make sure you leave a nice rating and a

review that really helps us out huge. Thanks as always to our excellent audio producers, Maya Cole and Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The First Times has Baby Attic