The heart of the galaxy containing the Earth is two "monsters" merged into one.

(NLDO) - Our Milky Way has a strange monster black hole at its center, spinning extremely fast and out of alignment with the rest of the galaxy.

According to Live Science , an international research team has just discovered the reason why the monster black hole Sagittarius A* (Sagittarius A*) seems to be "lost" compared to the rest of the Milky Way.

Sagittarius A* is a giant tear in space-time, part of a group of supermassive black holes - often called monster black holes - that are huge in the universe.

It has a mass of up to 4 million times that of the Sun and a diameter of about 23.5 million km.

The Milky Way's monster heart is the result of two giant black holes merging - Illustration AI: ANH THU

In new research, scientists discovered that behind that enormous size is the combination of two monster black holes: Sagittarius A* that we see today was born from a catastrophic merger with another massive black hole several billion years ago.

Given the scale of the merger, even after billions of years, the Milky Way's monster heart still can't truly sync with the rest of the galaxy.

"This discovery paves the way for our understanding of how supermassive black holes grow and evolve," said lead author Yihan Wang, an astrophysicist from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV - USA).

According to Dr. Wang, it was the highly misaligned spin of Sagittarius A* that revealed the merger. This impact significantly changed the amplitude and direction of the original black hole's spin.

The merger of black hole hearts is the final stage of a galaxy merger.

Our Milky Way, a monster in the galactic world, grew by swallowing about 20 other galaxies, as revealed by the dents on its main disk, some stars behaving strangely...

Professor Bing Zhang from UNLV, co-author, said they also calculated that the merger of these two black holes began 9 billion years ago and that it was the result of the famous merger between the Milky Way and the Gaia-Enceladus galaxy, one of the earliest and most violent mergers.

Source: https://nld.com.vn/trai-tim-thien-ha-chua-trai-dat-la-2-quai-vat-nhap-mot-196240913094432256.htm