Two of the galaxy’s strangest structures have become even more strangers.
Like a massive hourglass, balloons above and below the center of the Milky Way loom large above our galaxy. These giant twin orbs of overheated plasma have been erupting from the heart of the galaxy for millions of years. Today they range from tip to tip to tip to approximately 50,000 light years, collecting the longest heights of the Milky Way.
Scientists currently studying bewildering bubbles on a telescope at the US National Science Foundation Green Bank in West Virginia have discovered something shocking. Deep inside the super hot bubbles, this is a cloud of cold hydrogen gas, the Gargan River that mysteriously survived in extreme circumstances.
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Researchers say these bewildering clouds are likely the remains of much larger structures that bulged out of the galaxy’s center millions of years ago.
“Think of dropping an ice cubes into boiling water. Small ones melt quickly, while larger ones continue to melt — it continues to melt,” Prime Minister Ronmont Bordroy, an associate professor at the Faculty of Physics at North Carolina State University, told Live Science via email. “We believe these clouds are the remains of much larger structures that are currently eroding by galactic winds.”
This finding may indicate that our Galaxy central black hole had experienced a more recent violent explosion of material than previously thought, Bordroy added. A study describing the clouds was published in an astrophysics letter on July 7th.
Awkward bubbles
Fermi bubbles towering in the heart of the galaxy were discovered in 2010 by NASA’s Fermigamma Ray Space Telescope. Despite being comparable to our galaxy, bubbles are visible only in gamma rays, overlapping with the equally mystical X-ray counterpart known as the Erosita Bubble.
These bubbles are very hot, with the plasma that makes up Fermi bubbles reaching 1 million Kelvin (nearly 2 million degrees Fahrenheit). The bubbles are thought to be the result of an ancient violent explosion from the central black hole in the Milky Way. This simultaneously spits out twin jets of matter up and down the galaxy surface, scooping up nearby matter in the process, and jumping out into space.
Related: Scientists discover rare planets at the edge of the Milky Way using space-time phenomena predicted by Einstein
According to the research authors, the newly discovered cold hydrogen clouds could be the remains of some of the problems. The cold cloud discovered by Greenbank telescopes ranges from about 13 to 91 light years, each of which has been larger than the solar system many times.
But in order for these cold clouds to survive in the super hot environment, which was discovered in Fermi bubbles about 13,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy, they must have been quite large when they were first washed into the bubble rall, Bordroy said.
“In principle, these clouds shouldn’t have survived this long,” he added. “But they exist. It gives us a kind of clock. Their survival means that a black hole in the heart of the Milky Way erupted just millions of years ago. In the word of the universe, it’s a blink.”
This discovery will help solve the big mystery about Fermi bubbles. This age suggests that our Galaxy monster black holes can experience violent and sporadic explosions every time a large amount of material falls into it. However, the exact schedule of black hole eruptions in our galaxy remains an open question.
“What’s clear suggests that Fermi’s foam-like function, and more recently Erosita foam, was much more active in the recent past than we once believed,” Bordroy concluded.
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