Abstract
FOR twenty years there have been detections of an intermittent source of 511-keV electron–positron annihilation radiation at the centre of our Galaxy1–3. Until recently, none of the balloon or satellite experiments lucky enough to catch the source in its 'on' state had spatial resolution better than several degrees, but on 13–14 October 1990 the French SIGMA experiment aboard the Soviet GRANAT spacecraft observed a day-long burst of narrow-band γ rays, probably annihilation radiation, from within 1.5 arcmin of the known X-ray source IE 1740.7–2942, about 50 arcmin from Sgr A West, which contains the dynamical centre of the Milky Way4–6. Here we report millimetre-wavelength observations showing that this variable X-ray source lies on a line of sight to the dense 105M⊙ molecular cloud G–0.86–0.08, near the Galactic Centre. We suggest that the γ-ray source, probably a compact object, possibly a black hole, is accreting dense gas directly from the molecular cloud.
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Bally, J., Leventhal, M. Is the Galactic Centre gamma-ray source 1E1740.7 – 2942 accreting from a molecular cloud?. Nature 353, 234–237 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1038/353234a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/353234a0
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