There’s an Unprecedented Flickering Occurring in The Milky Way that Triggers Astronomers’ Curiosity

We should consider ourselves lucky for not having our planet located near the center of our Milky Way galaxy. That region is a bit too crowded for us, not to mention that there’s a monstrous supermassive black hole lurking beneath the stellar layers. But astronomers had recently found something even more peculiar: a flare that is flickering at the center of the galaxy.

A team of Keio University researchers found the peculiar phenomenon occurring. While some people would say that the flickering cannot possibly bring any good news for us, the explanation of the researchers sounds otherwise.

Sagittarius A is the culprit

Sagittarius A is the supermassive black hole present at the center of our galaxy. The researchers involved believe that the luminous signal is caused by the accretion disk surrounding the black hole and flaring up to give off extremely rapidly-rotating radio spots.

Lead author Yuhei Iwata explained:

This time, using ALMA, we obtained high-quality data of radio-wave intensity variation of Sgr A* for 10 days, 70 minutes per day,

Then we found two trends: quasi-periodic variations with a typical time scale of 30 minutes and hour-long slow variations.

Keio University professor Tomoharu Oka didn’t exclude the possibility for something else to be the culprit of the peculiar flickering:

This emission could be related with some exotic phenomena occurring at the very vicinity of the supermassive black hole,

The research explaining the cause of the flickering near the center of Milky Way was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. As you can see, no aliens trying to communicate with us were responsible for the flares, regardless of how much we want to believe otherwise. But although finding intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe seems like the ultimate goal for humanity, the truth is that whether we find them or not, both scenarios can be equally frightening.

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