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Title    Mystery Galactic Bubble Traveling at Breakneck Speed
Date    Sunday January 25 2015, @07:45PM
Author    martyb
Topic   
from the sorry-about-that,-officer dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/01/25/1938236

ticho wrote to tell us scientists have examined Fermi bubbles and have updated information — Huge Milky Way Gas Bubbles Clocked at 2 Million Miles per Hour:

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.

Links

  1. "ticho" - https://soylentnews.org/~ticho/
  2. "Fermi bubbles" - http://www.space.com/19099-milky-way-galaxy-giant-geysers.html
  3. "Huge Milky Way Gas Bubbles Clocked at 2 Million Miles per Hour" - http://www.space.com/28333-fermi-gas-bubbles-milky-way-core.html
  4. "Giant bubbles of gas" - http://www.space.com/28333-fermi-gas-bubbles-milky-way-core.html
  5. "available online in preprint form" - http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.148

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