Strange flares in the Milky Way. The discovery changes the image of galaxies

Deep in Antarctica, where some of the most stable observing conditions on Earth exist, the South Pole Telescope recorded powerful star flares coming from objects orbiting nearby supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. This area is 26,000 light-years away, extremely dense, dynamic and difficult to study in traditional light ranges. Observations in millimeter wave lengths However, they allowed them to break through the layers of dust that usually obscure the center of the galaxy.

A research team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications monitored over many observation seasons, looking for short-lived phenomena. This is how it was discovered sudden brightening caused by the so-called reconnection of magnetic fields (i.e. the sudden breaking and reconnection of magnetic field lines in opposite directions) in the atmospheres of stars. On the Sun, such events can disrupt the operation of satellites, but near the black hole the energy is many times greater.

The discovery has several key implications. First, it shows that millimeter observations are great for detecting fast, fleeting phenomena in dust-covered regions. Second, researchers’ observations provide information about stars that can survive in extreme environments full of strong gravitational tides, radiation and close encounters with other objects. Each such flare acts as short “probing” of the atmosphere and magnetic fields stars that could not be studied otherwise.