The centre of the Milky Way exploded 3.5 million years ago

We live in the galactic equivalent of the suburbs, but that doesn't mean our home galaxy is boring. Key points: The explosion at the centre of the Milky Way must have come from the accretion disc spinning around our supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* Understanding our galaxy is more active than we previously thought might also alter how we think it evolved This won't have been the first explosion in the centre of our galaxy and it won't be the last Approximately 3.5 million years ago, the centre of our Milky Way was the scene of a huge explosion which lasted for a relatively brief 300,000 years. "That tells you that in the lifetime of Australopithecus afarensis, cave people that were in Africa at the time, if they'd… looked up towards the Milky Way, they would have seen these giant cones beaming out from the galactic centre," Professor Bland-Hawthorn said. Indeed, Professor Bland-Hawthorn said, we're pretty confident that the black holes that drive these powerful jets, bubbles and winds feed energy back into the surrounding gases. The research reaffirms our belief that all black holes, whether they be huge or small, are all active, but they're active in some kind of stochastic or random way, Professor Bland-Hawthorn said.