The center of the Milky Way and its supermassive black hole, as you never had seen

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In the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way , still happens a violent “battle” that has as its epicenter a huge and powerful supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A * . There occur huge collisions of gases and materials that explode in emissions of x-ray that, for the moment, cannot be observed with the naked eye or through optical telescopes. However, the human being has managed to recreate this “fight of giants” in the center of our cosmic neighbourhood and a new simulation allows you to experience 500 years of cosmic evolution around Sagittarius A *, a black hole the size of four million solar masses.

On the display, dubbed ” Galactic Center VR “, the researchers modelled winds of 25 objects very bright and massive known as a Wolf-Rayet star, which is a few light years from the central galaxy, orbiting Sagittarius A *. The Wolf-Rayet star produces so much light that they expel their outer layers into space, creating winds supersonic . In the display, you can see how part of this material is captured by the gravity of the black hole and how it plummets towards him.

When the winds of the Wolf-Rayet star collide, the material is heated to millions of degrees, producing large amounts of X-rays . The center of the galaxy is too distant for that Chandra detects individual examples of these collisions, but the overall brightness of X-rays from this hot gas reaches the sensors of this telescope, reports the Observatory’s Chandra x-Ray.

Each color represents different phenomena, including the stars the Wolf-Rayet (blank), your orbits (grey) and the gas hot due to the collision of wind supersonic observed by Chandra (blue and cyan). There are also regions where the cooler material (red and yellow) is superimposed with the hot gas (purple). The display covers approximately 3 light years around Sagittarius A *.

This has been possible thanks to the combination of data from the observatory NASA’s Chandra and other telescopes with super-computing simulations, and virtual reality. The display is loaded in a virtual reality environment as a novel method to explore these simulations, and is available free of charge in stores, Steam and Viveport VR.