
Copernical Team
Lower atmospheric processes are crucial to understanding Martian water loss

NASA Goddard helps ensure asteroid deflector hits target

Sol 3320: Flexibility is Key

Kleos' Patrol Mission Satellites Ready and Shipped to Launch Site

Los Alamos National Laboratory awards satellite mission contract to NanoAvionics US

New rocket test facility under construction in Scotland

Redwire announces supplier agreement with Terran Orbital to support satellite manufacturing

Spire Global selects Virgin Orbit for late-load addition to next flight

Rocket Lab launches 109th satellite to orbit

Mini-jet found near Milky Way's supermassive black hole

Our Milky Way's central black hole has a leak. This supermassive black hole looks like it still has the vestiges of a blowtorch-like jet dating back several thousand years. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope hasn't photographed the phantom jet but has helped find circumstantial evidence that it is still pushing feebly into a huge hydrogen cloud and then splattering, like the narrow stream from a hose aimed into a pile of sand.
This is further evidence that the black hole, with a mass of 4.1 million Suns, is not a sleeping monster but periodically hiccups as stars and gas clouds fall into it. Black holes draw some material into a swirling, orbiting accretion disk where some of the infalling material is swept up into outflowing jets that are collimated by the black hole's powerful magnetic fields. The narrow "searchlight beams" are accompanied by a flood of deadly ionizing radiation.
"The central black hole is dynamically variable and is currently powered down," said Gerald Cecil of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.