An international team of astronomers has just made public the discovery of two gigantic "bubbles" of high-energy electrons just above and below the center of our galaxy. Both, very similar, measuring nearly 700 light years, and continue to grow. The researchers, who do not yet know what is the origin of these two structures, they believe they could be the result of a violentísimo event occurred just a few million years in the center of our galaxy. The spectacular finding has been published this week in the journal Nature.
According to the study, a potential trigger could be a strong outburst of Sagittarius A* the black hole that occupies the center of the Milky Way. A violent emission of matter and energy caused by a sudden increase of the quantity of matter of which the "monster", which has 4 million times the mass of the Sun , is powered. It would be the equivalent of a cosmic of a strong belch after too heavy a meal.
Another possibility is that the two bubbles of energy resulting from a sudden increase of births of stars around the galactic center, which would have resulted in a surge of supernova explosions. In total, the event released an amount of energy similar to that of the Sun will emit during its entire existence (about 10,000 million years).
scientists also believe that the bubbles of newly discovered could be related to other, much larger and more energy still, views for the first time in 2010 and known as " Bubbles Fermi " in honor of the instrument used, the space Telescope Fermi Gamma-Ray. Those two bubbles, which emit huge amounts of X-rays and gamma radiation, the more energy there is, is spread across 25,000 light years above and debjo the galactic center. And come from an event much more ancient and violent that it is assumed that feeds to the two newly found.
what Remains of an ancient explosion?it Is highly significant, moreover, that while the two huge bubbles of Fermi only issue, as has been said, X-rays and gamma, the two newly discovered do is just on the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum, much less energy, radio waves. What are these two new and recent bubbles feeding in some way to the previous? do Or are, on the contrary, the start of a burst much higher , which has just started? Scientists do not quite agree on this point.
To examine the extent and morphology almost identical to the new bubbles twin, the researchers think they were formed from a violent eruption that, over a short period of time, crossed the interstellar medium in opposite directions.
"These huge bubbles - ensures for its part Fernando Camilo of Sarao, co-author of the article - have been hidden until now by the glow of the radio emission is extremely bright from the center of the galaxy. To isolate the bubble from the background noise it was a tour de force technical, only possible thanks to the unique features and the ideal location of MeerKAT. With this unexpected discovery we are witnessing in the Milky Way a new manifestation of flows of matter and energy on galactic scale, in the last instance governed by the black hole focus".
A riddle of 35 years agohowever, what have made these two new structures is to clarify a mystery that took 35 years to torment the scientists. In 1984, in effect, a team of radio astronomers discovered a series of long filaments of radio emission of high-energy, extending outward from the center of the galaxy. It was a kind of "magnetic tubes" filled with electrons very energetic and whose source is completely unknown.
But the new images, obtained with the radio telescope MeerKAT in south Africa, demonstrate that the filaments are closely related with the own bubbles, indicating that they originate from the same event. There are more than a hundred of these filaments, and according to William Cotton, one of the team members, "almost all are confined in the interior of the bubbles of radio".
In the image that accompanies this article, the plane of the galaxy, which goes from the bottom right to the center of the upper part, is marked by a number of elements are bright, exploding stars, and regions in which new stars are born.
Sagitrio A*, the central hole of the Milky Way, is hidden behind those bright regions. The bubbles of radio newly discovered extend close to the upper-right corner of the image. In its interior there is a large number of magnetic filaments, that run along the bubbles.
Date Of Update: 13 September 2019, 00:00
