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posted by martyb on Sunday January 25 2015, @07:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the sorry-about-that,-officer dept.

Giant bubbles of gas that erupted from the core of the Milky Way galaxy 2.5-4 million years ago are expanding out into space at mind-blowing speeds, according to new observations that may help reveal how the strange balloon-like lobes formed. The giant structures now extend 30,000 light-years above and below the plane of the Milky Way.

"A few million years ago, there was a very energetic event at the galactic center, and we're seeing a remnant," lead author Andrew Fox, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, said at a press conference this month.

Fermi bubbles were first discovered in 2010 by scientists using NASA’s Fermi Large Area Telescope, which revealed two lobes of material protruding from the center of the Milky Way. Since then, the features have been studied in the X-ray and radio wavelengths.

Fox and his team paired Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph with a distant quasar to measure the speed and composition of the billowing bubbles. A quasar is a very bright source of light generated by fast-moving particles near a supermassive black hole inside a distant galaxy. Light from the quasar is so strong that it outshines its parent galaxy. The scientists measured how the ultraviolet light from quasar PDS 456 shifted as it passed through the base of the northern bubble.

With the help of the bright quasar, the team determined that material on the near side of the northern lobe is streaming toward the sun, while material on the far side is zipping away. The material is gushing out of the Milky Way at approximately 900 to 1,000 kilometers per second, or about 2 million mph.

The study will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, and will be available online in preprint form on archive.org.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ticho on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:05PM

    by ticho (89) on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:05PM (#137972) Homepage Journal

    Thanks for improving on my rather minimalistic submission, @martyb (I hope this will retroactively start working after the new site update becomes active :) ).

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by SunTzuWarmaster on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:16PM

    by SunTzuWarmaster (3971) on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:16PM (#137974)

    Light speed is:
    670,616,629 mph

    The Fermi bubbles are travelling at ~3e-7 % c.

    The OMG particle was moving at 99.99999999999999999999951% c, which I have always found unsettling.

    • (Score: 2) by SuperCharlie on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:45PM

      by SuperCharlie (2939) on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:45PM (#137982)

      The OMG particle is very interesting to me.. link me pls?

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:16PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:16PM (#137994)

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle [wikipedia.org]

        That particle or event follows a well traveled path in astrophysics, like pulsars, oh look here is one unusual singular item, and a generation later they're multiplying like rabbits and theres like 500 known similar objects. Exoplanets are about the same. I would assume known sentient communicating alien species will be the same curve, we'll take forever to go from none to 1 and then it'll go exponential in like 5 years. Just the way of the astronomy world...

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday January 25 2015, @10:24PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 25 2015, @10:24PM (#138020) Journal
      On the other side, a literal "breakneck speed" is less than 100 mph.
      (yes, I know, its not the fall that kills you, its hitting the ground. So what's the deal with breakneck speed anyway?)
      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @05:52AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @05:52AM (#138095)

        And exactly how would a galactic bubble break its neck, anyway? Break gas, Breaking wind! Not me, it was the Milky Way, dude!

    • (Score: 1) by terryk30 on Monday January 26 2015, @12:58PM

      by terryk30 (1753) on Monday January 26 2015, @12:58PM (#138151)

      That actually works out to 0.3% c.

      But the point I want to make is how silly it is (almost to the point of being grating) for science reporting to translate astronomical distances or velocities into "everyday" units. 2 million mph! What's that supposed to mean to me, other than "Golly!"? Even worse is when a distance to an exopolanet ferchrissakes is given in so-many bazillion km or whatnot.

      Sure, the intent is for the public to appreciate the work. But if you want their appreciation to be more than "golly" (or worse, glazed-over), it's OK to use a unit of measurement that at least carries a picture of the reality (like 1000 km/s - that I can sort of picture).

      (This part I'll make a footnote: the 1000 km/s was of course already given. If it was felt the main audience needed it in mph, why not miles per second?)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:27PM (#137978)

    How far from us is our side of the bubble?
        or How long will it take before Earth contact?

    Interesting to note what happens when the bubble's edge sweeps over a star system.
    Can they view interaction to systems in the bubble's edge?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:46PM (#137984)

      It's next Tuesday, and it's not a bubble, it's a hyperspace bypass.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:50PM (#137986)

      The Milky Way is 100,000 ly across.
      The Earth at 26,000 ly from center.
      The bubble has expanded 30,000 ly.

      Guess we don't have to wonder what happens when it hits earth.

      Although, the gas will be absorbed and deflected by material along the galactic plane.
      So the bubble is probably a misnomer and more of a bell-shape expansion of gas not as acute as superluminal jets.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:22PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:22PM (#137997)

        They look more like an atomic p orbital than a s orbital so the math isn't so simple.

        I wonder if the bubbles really look as perfect as the pix or if someone's playing games with artistic license and borrowed some chemical orbital pix and did some photoshopping to get the point across.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:27PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:27PM (#138000)

      Will matter more once the sound reaches earth, plenty of time to work it out.

      Speed of smell, now that is another urgent matter for science, entirely.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @03:11AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @03:11AM (#138071)

        The God Fart.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Ken_g6 on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:50PM

    by Ken_g6 (3706) on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:50PM (#137985)

    Five rogue exoplanets [wikipedia.org] have been discovered moving away from the core [wikipedia.org] at 80% the speed of light.

  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:58PM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:58PM (#138012) Journal

    From the "artist's conception" in the FA, our home galaxy may look much more like Centaurus A (NGC 5128) than Andromeda.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @12:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @12:13AM (#138038)

    Paper identifier '1412.148' not recognized

  • (Score: 2) by nyder on Monday January 26 2015, @04:22AM

    by nyder (4525) on Monday January 26 2015, @04:22AM (#138078)

    I wonder what would happen is this giant gas bubble was to pop. Would it affect us? Would it be destructive, would it be creative, would it be beautiful?

    Shit like this is why we should spend that money going to war on better things like space travel.

    I'm not religious, but if I was, I would firmly believe that god made the planets & galaxies for us to explore, not so we stick around on earth killing each other over different interpretations of what is basically the same religions.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @06:37PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @06:37PM (#138268)

      Not sure if serious...

    • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday January 26 2015, @07:34PM

      by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Monday January 26 2015, @07:34PM (#138287) Homepage Journal

      WTF do you think it's doing? It's "popping" and away from us.

      Sheesh. Kids. To put it more simply, the galaxy farted.

      --
      mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @07:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @07:33AM (#138105)

    It's aliens Lister!