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posted by Fnord666 on Monday September 23 2019, @08:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the filaments-and-bubbles dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The Milky Way Has Giant Bubbles at Its Center

Farhad Yusef-Zadeh was observing the center of the Milky Way galaxy in radio waves, looking for the presence of faint stars, when he saw it: a spindly structure giving off its own radio emissions. The filament-like feature was probably a glitch in the telescope, or something clouding the field of view, he decided. It shouldn't be here, he thought, and stripped it out of his data.

But the mystery filament kept showing up, and soon Yusef-Zadeh found others. What the astronomer had mistaken for an imperfection turned out to be an entire population of cosmic structures at the heart of the galaxy.

More than 100 filaments have been detected since Yusef-Zadeh's first encounter in the early 1980s. Astronomers can't completely explain them, but they have given them familiar labels, naming them after the earthly things they resemble: the pelican, the mouse, the snake. The menagerie of filaments is clustered around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. "They haven't been found elsewhere," says Yusef-Zadeh, a physics and astronomy professor at Northwestern University.

Their origins remained a mystery, too, until now.

New observations of the galactic center have revealed a pair of giant bubbles at the center of the Milky Way that give off radio emissions, according to recent research published in Nature. The bubbles stretch outward from the black hole and extend into space in opposite directions. The billowy lobes resemble the two halves of an hourglass, with the black hole nestled at its waist. And the filaments that Yusef-Zadeh discovered all those years ago are encased within.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @12:25PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @12:25PM (#897522)

    And I thought I was making a statement in the opposite direction? Maybe any form of sarcasm is tooooo muuch difficult for the Internets?

    My point was, that many "experts" invent stuff when they don't know rather than say they don't fucking know. It's better to say you don't fucking know. And I'm not even knocking experts - I'm knocking human intuition that if you don't know, you can make a guess based on experience. You can't do that.

    If anything this points the way that we MUST stop using intuition to explain things. Science is not intuition - it's evidence. And the entire thing with Dark Energy and Dark Matter is nothing but based on intuition and assumptions.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday September 23 2019, @01:57PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 23 2019, @01:57PM (#897549) Journal

    And the entire thing with Dark Energy and Dark Matter is nothing but based on intuition and assumptions.

    That doesn't make them in the least unscientific. They are classes of hypotheses. More measurement will be able to confirm or rule them out.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @10:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @10:27PM (#897846)

    AC you replied to here.

    I guess you got Poe'd [wikipedia.org].

    Although I'd point out that intuition and outside of the box thinking are exactly the proper methods for theoretical science. Without such creativity (followed by the data to back it up -- that's an essential part too), we wouldn't have Newtonian physics, Einstein's theories of general and special relativity, quantum mechanics and untold other pieces of scientific progress.

    In order to discover new science, we need to step outside what's known and consider what's possible. That's less useful in *applied* science, but absolutely critical for theoretical science.