Giant space bubbles baffle astronomers

**Toad** · November 11th, 2010, 13:53

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...tronomers.html

Giant space bubbles baffle astronomers

Two giant gas bubbles - each one 25,000 light-years wide - discovered in our galaxy are baffling astronomers.

The two vast structures, stretching to the north and to the south of the centre of the Milky Way, are so big that a beam of light, travelling at 186,282 miles per second, would take 50,000 years to get from the edge of one to the edge of the other.

The previously unseen bubbles were discovered by astronomer Doug Finkbeiner, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, using NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope. He admitted yesterday: "We don't fully understand their nature or origin."

They span more than half the visible sky, from the constellation of Virgo to the constellation of Grus, and are thought to be millions of years old. They were not noticed before because they were lost in a fog of gamma radiation across the sky.

Astronomers' best guess is that the bubbles were created by an eruption from a supersized black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

Mr Finkbeiner and his team discovered the bubbles by processing publicly available data from Fermi's Large Area Telescope. The space telescope, launched in 2008, is the most powerful detector of gamma rays, which are the most energetic form of light.

Scientist David Spergel, of Princeton University, New Jersey, said: "In other galaxies, we see that starbursts can drive enormous gas outflows.

Whatever the energy source behind these huge bubbles may be, it is connected to many deep questions in astrophysics."

**zenbudda** · November 11th, 2010, 15:02

Interesting. I wonder if the galaxy burps and farts?

**Toad** · November 11th, 2010, 15:11

You know, when a star goes supernova, it often develops that double-bubble effect like that. You see it in neubulas sometimes.

**American Patriot** · November 11th, 2010, 17:08

There's a massive black hole in the center of the galaxy. Black holes tend to spew matter from the poles.

Most likely what we're seeing is a effects of high ionization from the gama radiation coming from the black hole and this is just like a smaller scale borealis as we might see on earth, only really, really big.

**zenbudda** · November 11th, 2010, 18:40

didn't astronomers recently determine that galaxies are born by black holes drawing matter close, and the closer the matter gets to the black hole, the matter starts to coalesce and form stars, planets etc? in essence, black holes are galaxy engines.

**American Patriot** · November 11th, 2010, 18:55

I'm not sure there was a "discovery". There might be a newer theory on that, but the "Primordial Fluctuation theory" is the most... accepted.

If I remember rightly, after the big bang the universe was something less than homogeneous... essentially it was full of bumps and holes I guess is one way to put it.

Some of the clumps of matter became the "seeds" of what became galaxies.

At least that's the theory

**MTStringer** · December 5th, 2010, 12:50

Zenbudda, clearly it's an alpha male galaxy so I'm sure it burps and farts.

Rick, wasn't it the discovery of the CMBR that led to string theory, dark matter etc? I remember the pics, looked like foam, and seem to remember the article was about dark matters gravitational effects influencing the formation of galaxies from the primordial soup after the big bang.

**American Patriot** · December 6th, 2010, 15:34

Originally Posted by Peterle Matteo

We can see outer space galaxies from here with telescopes.

Why nobody reported something similar in other than ours galaxy?

That is an image taken in visible light, so you're not going to see anything like that.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Optical and X-ray Images of Andromeda Galaxy

Caption: The large image here shows an optical view, with the Digitized Sky Survey, of the Andromeda Galaxy, otherwise known as M31. The inset shows Chandra images of a small region in the center of Andromeda. The image on the left shows a sum of Chandra images taken before January 2006 and the image on the right shows a sum of images taken after January 2006. Before 2006, three X-ray sources are clearly visible, including one faint source close to the center of the image. After 2006, a fourth source, called M31*, appears just below and to the right of the central source, produced by material falling onto the supermassive black hole in M31.

**American Patriot** · December 6th, 2010, 15:36

I think Peterle because they have not aimed that particular telescope at Andromeda? haha

**American Patriot** · December 6th, 2010, 15:39

Galactic Core Spews Weird Radiation Bubbles

By Dave Mosher
November 9, 2010 |
5:31 pm |
Categories: Astronomy, Space

Two colossal bubbles of high-energy radiation are careening out of the Milky Way’s core, a new analysis of images from NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope shows.
The 19 months’ worth of data reveal twin 25,000-light-year-long blobs of gamma-ray and X-ray radiation are poking out above and below our galaxy’s 100,000-light-year-long disk of stars.

“We don’t fully understand their nature or origin,” astronomer Doug Finkbeiner of Harvard University said in a press release Nov. 9.

One prime suspect for the bubbles’ creator is the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, according to the study, published on arXiv.org and accepted to The Astrophysical Journal. Weighing in at more than 4 million times the mass of the sun, such a black hole is capable of furious outbursts of energy when surrounding matter falls into it.

“Another possible source of dramatic energy injection is a powerful starburst in the nucleus,” Finkbeiner and other authors wrote in the study. Such a starburst is “driven by the energy released by supernova explosions and stellar winds following an intense episode of star formation,” they wrote, and may have occurred some 10 million years ago.

Whatever is blowing the bubbles from the Milky Way’s core, the authors suspect new instruments, including the Planck spacecraft (launched in 2009) and the eROSITA X-ray telescope (scheduled to launch in 2012), will find out.

Images: 1) In this illustration, gamma-ray bubbles (purple) flanked by X-rays (blue) protrude 25,000 light-years each out of the Milky Way. NASA Goddard (hi-res). 2) The gamma-ray sky, as seen by NASA’s Fermi space telescope. A dumbbell-shaped feature (yellow/orange) can be seen at galactic center extending out of the Milky Way’s flat plane. NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT/D. Finkbeiner et al. (hi-res)
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