What are the two huge bubbles of energy that arise from the poles of our galaxy?

José Manuel NievesSEGUIR Updated: Save Send news by mail electrónicoTu name *

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In September of last year, an international team of astronomers, published in “Nature” the discovery of two gigantic bubbles of high-energy electrons emerging , above and below, right in the center of the Milky Way. Measuring nearly 700 light-years away, emitted in the range of the radio waves, and its size was still increasing.

they were Not the first to be discovered. In 2010, in fact, he had already found something, if anything, even more impressive: two other huge bubbles, known as “Bubbles Fermi” in honor of the instrument used, the space Telescope Fermi Gamma Ray, made of gas, dust and cosmic rays, emerging also from the galactic center as if they were the wings of a huge moth, one on each side of Sagittarius A*, the black hole that exists in the center of our galaxy.

The origin of the mysterious bubbles

tip to tip, the sum of these two bubbles extending over 50,000 light-years (about half the diameter of the Milky Way), and given the fact that they emit is just on the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum that the two discovered in 2019, in the range of the X-rays and Gamma. Now, in an article recently published in “The Astrophysical Journal”, Ruiyu Zhang Fulai Guo, Of the Astronomical Observatory of Shanghai, in China, have discovered that everything could be related .

where did this come From all of these mysterious structures? And how you came to form? In reality, it is a question for which there is not yet a response. Now, the investgadores believe that both the bubbles found in the past year and these, in addition to other structures for radio and X-rays surrounding the Milky Way, have a common origin: a series of explosions in Sagittarius A* , or, if you prefer, a series of “burps of power” that began to occur about six million years ago.

By means of computer simulations, Ruiyu and Guo managed to demonstrate that both the “bubbles Fermi” as the other structures detected could have been formed at the same time due to a massive shock wave that came out of the black hole. The wave may have started when Sagittarius A*, whose mass equivalent to four million suns, issued suddenly two huge jets of matter ionized, throw them in opposite directions to almost the speed of light. Astronomers have observed already in other galaxies, although not our own, jets of energy from that class, although its origin remains uncertain.

Two exposivas shock waves

The researchers believe that if those jets were of sufficient width and energy could have created shock waves twin spread explosively through the hot gas on each side of the galactic center. There, where the shock wave compressed and heated the gas, forming the strange structures of X-rays in an hourglass shape. The edges of the shock wave, expanding through space over thousands and thousands of light years, formed after the bubbles from Fermi. According to written Ruiyu and Guo in his article, the whole process would have taken approximately a million years.

According to the researchers, the hypothesis of the shock wave manage to explain several features of the galactic center, including the extremely high temperatures of the bubbles from Fermi and the fact that their lower edges overlap and fit perfectly with the structures of x-rays.

What you don’t know yet is what it was that could cause such shock waves . Maybe a “food” too abundant? Do you or can be the result of a sudden increase of births of stars around the center of the galaxy, which had increased the number of supernova explosions? Scientists are not sure. What we do know is that, whatever it was, the event released an amount of energy similar to that of the Sun will emit during its entire existence , about 10,000 million years ago…