At the center of the Milky Way, among dense clouds of gas and dust, lies a region called Sagittarius C. It's like a bustling crossroads: stars are born here, streams of matter collide, and the whole scene is illuminated by X-rays. For a long time, this glow remained a mystery.
Astronomers delved into the archives of two X-ray telescopes, Chandra and XMM-Newton, and examined the cloud in detail. It turned out that the glow consists of two components. One is hot gas (plasma) at a temperature of about a million degrees, typical of star-forming regions. But the second component is hotter — nearly 90 million degrees. Such heat doesn't arise just from young stars.
The most intriguing part is that the cloud is expanding, with data showing gas moving at about 800 kilometers per second. That's incredibly fast: in one second, such gas would cover the distance from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod. Most likely, a massive star exploded in the cloud recently — about 1700 years ago in cosmic terms. The shock wave from the explosion heated the gas and caused it to expand, like air in a popped balloon.
So Sagittarius C turns out to be not just a star-forming region, but a place where stellar birth and death coexist. This helps us understand how the center of our Galaxy lives and changes.
If such an explosion occurred at the Sun's location, the shock wave would reach Earth in an hour and a half.
In Dan Simmons' novel 'Hyperion', a supernova explosion at the center of the galaxy causes the demise of an entire civilization.