Millions of years ago, a powerful explosion shook its center Milk GangaBlasting the sky, sending two shock waves. Those waves bulldozed out of the galaxy, heating up all the gas and dust in their path and leaving two total blobs of hot, extremely excited gamma-rays in their wake.
Today, it’s blobs – now named Fermi Bubbles – Extend half the width of our galaxy. One lobe towers up to 25,000 light-years above the galaxy’s disk, and the other as large as below it. Since their discovery in 2010, bubbles have been the monotony of our galaxy – and now we know it’s not alone.
As scientists continue to study our galaxy in each wavelength of light imaginative, fantastic new creations within the Fermi bubbles – Plasma “chimney” Inflate slowly Radio energy holiday balloons – Keep coming out. Now, a paper was published on December 9 in the journal Nature Yet some of the largest Fermi-familiar compositions reveal: “Erosita bubbles.”
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Visible only in X-ray Emissions, these new bubbles are significantly less powerful (and less hot) than Fermi blobs, but almost vigorous, measuring about 45,000 light-years from end to end. Like the Fermi bubble, these orbs of hot gas towers above and below the galactic plane, in the shape of a separate hourglass, meet at two points in the center of the galaxy.
Given their similar shape and common midpoint, it is possible that the Fermi and Erosita bubbles have a physical connection, and perhaps the same outbreak of galactic fireworks millions of years ago, the authors wrote in their study. What caused the bubbles to blow in the first place is still a mystery, but astronomers suspect that one is involved. Explosive explosion The central black hole of our galaxy, Sagittarius a.
That clarity applies to new diffused X-ray bubbles, the study authors wrote, considering the amount of energy needed to inflate them. The team calculated that these structures required the same energy radiation release of 100,000 supernovae (explosions of powerful stars) – a figure with X-ray energy radiation observed in other galaxies with active black holes at their centers. Even if this imaginary eruption is millions of years old, its traces will still be visible.
“It takes a very long time to heal such diffuse scars,” said Rendria Merloni, a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, author of the study. Said in a statement.
Meroloni and his colleagues discovered X-ray bubbles using the Erosita X-ray telescope, which orbits the morning cosmos on a Russian-German Specter-RG satellite. The telescope scans the entire sky every six months, constantly updating our view of the X-ray universe.
Published on Original Living Science.