NASA Announces Televised Chandra News Conference - "exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood", page 3

reply to post by Ophiuchus 13

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i couldn't see update 7 - they were on a new website portal that i couldn't access - can you paste the most recent
update past 6 if there is one - please?

Originally posted by drphilxr

Originally posted by Essan
reply to post by St Udio

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I wouldn't say necessarily within the Milky Way, to me cosmic neighbourhood would be the local group of galaxies. So within a few tens of millions of light years. But I may be wrong.

Tsk Tsk there are so many interpretations of local neighborhood.

Local Solar system - that goes out nearly 2 light years. I would start there.

Yes, its possible its a quadrant or outer limb galactic thing.

My money is on LOCAL from the orbit of saturn to asteroid belt*, despite chandra focusing

on very distant galaxies near quasars 8 billion light years away! (but a kuiper belt object is

also very possible)

edit on 11/11/2010 by drphilxr because: little caveat added

Cosmic not local. I put my money against yours

-rrr

reply to post by tetsuo

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One thing is for sure I dont think they will tell the entire truth.

Could it be this?


WASHINGTON -- NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy.

"What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center," said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first recognized the feature. "We don't fully understand their nature or origin."

The structure spans more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus, and it may be millions of years old. A paper about the findings has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Finkbeiner and his team discovered the bubbles by processing publicly available data from Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT). The LAT is the most sensitive and highest-resolution gamma-ray detector ever launched. Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light.

Other astronomers studying gamma rays hadn't detected the bubbles partly because of a fog of gamma rays that appears throughout the sky. The fog happens when particles moving near the speed of light interact with light and interstellar gas in the Milky Way. The LAT team constantly refines models to uncover new gamma-ray sources obscured by this so-called diffuse emission. By using various estimates of the fog, Finkbeiner and his colleagues were able to isolate it from the LAT data and unveil the giant bubbles.

Scientists now are conducting more analyses to better understand how the never-before-seen structure was formed. The bubble emissions are much more energetic than the gamma-ray fog seen elsewhere in the Milky Way. The bubbles also appear to have well-defined edges. The structure's shape and emissions suggest it was formed as a result of a large and relatively rapid energy release - the source of which remains a mystery.

One possibility includes a particle jet from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. In many other galaxies, astronomers see fast particle jets powered by matter falling toward a central black hole. While there is no evidence the Milky Way's black hole has such a jet today, it may have in the past. The bubbles also may have formed as a result of gas outflows from a burst of star formation, perhaps the one that produced many massive star clusters in the Milky Way's center several million years ago.

"In other galaxies, we see that starbursts can drive enormous gas outflows," said David Spergel, a scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. "Whatever the energy source behind these huge bubbles may be, it is connected to many deep questions in astrophysics."

Hints of the bubbles appear in earlier spacecraft data. X-ray observations from the German-led Roentgen Satellite suggested subtle evidence for bubble edges close to the galactic center, or in the same orientation as the Milky Way. NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe detected an excess of radio signals at the position of the gamma-ray bubbles.

The Fermi LAT team also revealed Tuesday the instrument's best picture of the gamma-ray sky, the result of two years of data collection.

"Fermi scans the entire sky every three hours, and as the mission continues and our exposure deepens, we see the extreme universe in progressively greater detail," said Julie McEnery, Fermi project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

NASA's Fermi is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

"Since its launch in June 2008, Fermi repeatedly has proven itself to be a frontier facility, giving us new insights ranging from the nature of space-time to the first observations of a gamma-ray nova," said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These latest discoveries continue to demonstrate Fermi's outstanding performance.”



www.nasa.gov...

reply to post by Oxize

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They refer specifically to the Chandra X-ray observatory.

Originally posted by JohnySeagull
reply to post by Oxize

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They refer specifically to the Chandra X-ray observatory.

yes but the Xandra also picked this thing up. Fermi and Xandra working together on that.

I bet it is the Gamma ray bubble they discovered at the center of our milky way (cosmic neighbourhoud)

Originally posted by stirling

Seriously, though, if its infra red they are talking about id say maybe theyve finally confirmed our dwarf companion.
T

Chandra is an X-ray observatory, not infrared. So, it's probably MAXI J1409-619, a neutron star or a black hole with a massive companion star first seen a couple of weeks ago. The instant email notification that went out to physicists and astronomers is at www.astronomerstelegram.org...

reply to post by Oxize

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It's odd that they keep using the word "structure"
When I think of that word I think of something artificially-made......

Here it is. Not too exciting, imo.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has observed an unusual galaxy cluster that contains a bright core of relatively cool gas surrounding a quasar called 3C 186. This is the most distant such object yet observed, and could provide insight into the triggering of quasars and the growth of galaxy clusters. What makes this particular galaxy cluster and its strong cooling core interesting is its age. 3C 186 is about 8 billion light years away from Earth, making it the most distant known galaxy cluster to contain a prominent cooling core.

Nasa

reply to post by Oaktree

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I doubt it. 8 billion light-years away is nowhere near our "cosmic neighborhood" by anyone's standards.

reply to post by ksorelleesq

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I think they have already announced this. 3C 186

You never know. They might of found something else crazy within it but this has already been released going on a month now.

Originally posted by Magnus47
reply to post by Oaktree

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I doubt it. 8 billion light-years away is nowhere near our "cosmic neighborhood" by anyone's standards.

Agreed.... I doubt they would hold a news conference for it either because discoveries like that usually only make regular news and aren't televised conferences by NASA.

What are the chances that they are setting the stage for something bigger? Perhaps they will announce an "object" that they want to "probe" more... and then an announcement comes in a few more weeks, that after probing this object, some other anomalies have been discovered... and the next think you know...

... it's PANDORA!

~Namaste

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