Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Brightening Of The Bridge: Reflections Of A Past Sgr A* Outburst In Galactic Center Molecular Clouds, Nathalie Kanoelani Takiko Jones

Senior Projects Spring 2021

The center of our Milky Way galaxy is located more than 200,000 trillion km from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. At the very center of our galaxy is a super-massive black hole called Sagittarius A$^{*}$. The black hole is surrounded by many interesting objects, including molecular clouds. Molecular clouds are large, cold clouds of gas in which stars are formed. Telescopes like NuSTAR have observed X-rays (radiation 10,000 times higher in energy than visible light) coming from these molecular clouds. Since cold gas cannot create such high energy emission by itself, there must be some external source of radiation interacting …