Black hole explodes at the centre of the Milky Way

Long time ago a supermassive black hole exploded at the centre of our galaxy. The Hubble observatory has found evidence of a cataclysmic flare that punched its way out of our galaxy about 3.5 million years ago.

Australian scientists used the space telescope to detect the imprint of the ancient explosion in a trail of gas some 200,000 light-years from the heart of the Milky Way. The black hole at the centre of the Milky Way exploded shooting expanding beams of energy into deep space like a nuclear lighthouse, New research has discovered that the event, known as a Seyfert flare, created two cones of ionising radiation which sliced through the galaxy and even impacted cosmic bodies outside of it.

The flare was so powerful that it hit the Magellanic Stream, a trail of gas extending between the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, nearby dwarf galaxies. That black hole, known as Saggitarius A, is more than four million times as massive as our sun. Using data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope, Professor Bland-Hawthorn and her researchers calculated that the massive explosion took place little more than three million years ago.

In galactic terms, that is astonishingly recent explained the team at the research centre ASTRO 3-D. At the time on Earth, the asteroid that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs was already 63 million years in the past, and humanity’s ancient ancestors, the Australopithecines, were walking in Africa.