The strange cloud of gas that seems to orbit around nothing

A peculiar cloud of gas, with an elongated and curved shape, seems to be revolving around a point in space devoid of celestial bodies. It is located about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius, not far from the center of our galaxy.

The cloud was discovered by the team of Miyuki Kaneko, from Keio University in Japan.

To make the finding, the team used data collected from observations made with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, now attached to the East Asia Observatory, and the 45-meter-diameter Nobeyama radio telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). .

The curved shape of the cloud of molecular gas suggests that it is being stretched by a strong gravitational pull from a high-mass object around which it orbits. But at the point around which the cloud revolves, there is no object, or at least no object emitting light or detectable amounts of other radiation. The only plausible explanation is that there is a black hole there.

Black holes are fabulous concentrations of mass, with a gravitational field so strong that anything that gets too close, including light, falls into the hole. Since light cannot escape, the object does not shine and, were it not for the perceptible effects of its gravitational influence on its immediate surroundings, it would go unnoticed.

Artist’s impression of the strangely shaped cloud and the black hole around which it appears to orbit. (Illustration: Keio University)

The study in which the discovery was made is titled “Discovery of the Tadpole Molecular Cloud near the Galactic Nucleus”. And it has been published in the academic journal The Astrophysical Journal.

The next step in this line of research will be to use the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) radio telescopes to try to detect signals from the nearby environment of the black hole that unequivocally reveal its presence and provide data that corroborate its nature. and indicate its mass and other data.

ALMA is the result of a partnership between the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences of Japan (NINS) in cooperation with Chile. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)