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In December 2010, scientists working with the Fermi telescope found two giant lobes extending from the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Twenty-five thousand light-years high, each bubble spans more than half of the visible sky, reaching from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus, and may be relatively young at just a million or so years old.
The bubbles are a recent find, normally masked by the fog of gamma rays that appears throughout the sky as a result of particles moving near the speed of light interacting with light and interstellar gas in the Milky Way. Scientists only found the bubbles by manipulating the data from the telescope to draw out the striking feature.
From end to end, the newly discovered gamma-ray bubbles extend 50,000 light-years, or roughly half of the Milky Way's diameter, as shown in this illustration. Hints of the bubbles' edges were first observed in X-rays (blue) by ROSAT, a Germany-led mission operating in the 1990s. The gamma rays mapped by Fermi (magenta) extend much farther from the galaxy's plane. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
The newfound bubbles, meanwhile, are made of hot, charged gas that's releasing the same amount of energy as a hundred thousand exploding stars.
"So you have to ask, where could energy like that come from" in the Milky Way? Finkbeiner said.
" Finkbeiner said, referring to the fact that the structures are well-defined domes.
Dark matter would have existed at the galaxy's core from the start, and the particles would have been continuously interacting.
"If something has been going on for billions of years and it is in a steady state, I would not expect to see a sharp-edged s
"These faint jets are a ghost or after-image of what existed a million years ago," said Meng Su, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and lead author of a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
"They strengthen the case for an active galactic nucleus in the Milky Way's relatively recent past," he added.
The two beams, or jets, were revealed by NASA's Fermi space telescope. They extend from the galactic center to a distance of 27,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane. They are the first such gamma-ray jets ever found, and the only ones close enough to resolve with Fermi.
The newfound jets may be related to mysterious gamma-ray bubbles that Fermi detected in 2010. Those bubbles also stretch 27,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. However, where the bubbles are perpendicular to the galactic plane, the gamma-ray jets are tilted at an angle of 15 degrees. This may reflect a tilt of the accretion disk surrounding the supermassive black hole.
You mean Earth? No, not really. Look at the diagram.
Are these GAMMA RAY bubbles coming towards EA*RTH?
The gamma rays have reached Earth. Otherwise they could not have been detected.
Is there ANY POTENTIAL effect to be experienced if the ENERGY from these GAMMA RAYS reaches SOL SPACE?
Originally posted by IntoxicatingMadness
Pretty underwhelming considering all the doom with gamma rays.
Electromagnetic energy and photons get hyper accelerated when around the Supermassive black hole.
Originally posted by IntoxicatingMadness
Who the hell is flagging me? It's only one person :L
Yes. They would get blueshifted going toward the black hole and redshifted heading away from it, so they are affected by their trip passing near a black hole, but they don't experience any hyper-acceleration.
Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by Soloro
Electromagnetic energy and photons travel at the speed of light. They cannot be "hyper accelerated".
Electromagnetic energy and photons get hyper accelerated when around the Supermassive black hole.
I'm not sure what you mean by "GAMMA RAY transfer". If you're referring to the Gamma Ray Burst I just mentioned, it will travel at the speed of light so it won't slow down. If a GRB occurs too close to us, it could cause a mass extinction, though this is unlikely to happen any time soon. According to that link such an event may have caused the Ordovician-Silurian extinction event of 450 million years ago. And it could happen again, but the chances it will happen in our lifetime are very small.
Originally posted by Ophiuchus 13
Arbitrageur, thanks for your response, do you think the hot gasses or ANYTHING else related to the GAMMA RAY transfer will cool or slow before reaching SOL space or wont make it at all?