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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, @09:08AM (11 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:08AM (#897473)

    But I was taught that our galaxy is nice and calm and that any jets from galactic cores surely make the galaxy inhospitable for life.... seems most of astronomy is complete guesswork and assumptions. Like science back in the wacky Dark Ages!! WHHEEE!!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:14AM (#897474)

      We are in a suburb of the Milky Way, far away from the violence of the inner center.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:19AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:19AM (#897476)

      A monster with tentacles was censored from scientific data since 1985 for a reason. Let's just hope He is still sleeping...

      • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday September 23 2019, @05:28PM

        by DeathMonkey (1380) on Monday September 23 2019, @05:28PM (#897686) Journal

        I can't tell if you're referring to the Flying Spaghetti Monster or C'thulu.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 23 2019, @09:34AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 23 2019, @09:34AM (#897478) Journal

      But I was taught that our galaxy is nice and calm and that any jets from galactic cores surely make the galaxy inhospitable for life...

      Mate, real-estate bubbles are common on Earth and life haven't ceased yet.
      Why would be the central galactic real-estate bubbles be different?

      Like science back in the wacky Dark Ages!! WHHEEE!!

      "Central galactic location bubbles" and Universe's accelerated inflation? Two examples capitalism at its best, bleeding edge of the civilized world, I tell yea!

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 23 2019, @10:38AM (2 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 23 2019, @10:38AM (#897492) Journal

      I don't know who would have taught you that our galaxy is "calm". If, and that is a big IF, there is anything unique about the Milky Way, it is only that it has spawned life. Or, should I say that it has spawned life that we know about?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_novae_in_the_Milky_Way_galaxy [wikipedia.org]
      https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/04/599437677/new-study-shows-the-center-of-the-milky-way-has-thousands-of-black-holes [npr.org]

      As for guesswork in astronomy, yeah, I suppose so. It's not like we can (easily) create our own universe to observe and experiment in. Computer models don't count, because we don't have much of an idea how many variables, much less which variables, to program into the model. Guesswork yes, but it's the most educated guesswork that we can bring to bear on the question.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @12:16PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @12:16PM (#897520)

        If, and that is a big IF, there is anything unique about the Milky Way, it is only that it has spawned life. Or, should I say that it has spawned life that we know about?

        Not sure if either qualifies as humble.

        My point is that people look around and *assume* things all the time. We *assume* that the ground your house is on is stable. But if you look at different timescale, there isn't much difference between your solid ground and the water bug standing on top of a stream. Perspective. We ALL lack that so much.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 23 2019, @01:50PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 23 2019, @01:50PM (#897545) Journal

          If, and that is a big IF, there is anything unique about the Milky Way, it is only that it has spawned life. Or, should I say that it has spawned life that we know about?

          [...] My point is that people look around and *assume* things all the time.

          There's a big difference between an assumption and a fact. Our existence and the knowledge that multicellular life has been kicking around for a little over half a billion years demonstrates a certain level of stability in our region of the Milky Way as well as demonstrating that the Milky Way is capable of spawning life.

          But if you look at different timescale, there isn't much difference between your solid ground and the water bug standing on top of a stream.

          Which means what? It's irrelevant to whether the ground is stable enough for your house or not because either your house isn't around for that time scale or one can repair or move the house every time that slow ground movement becomes relevant.

          Perspective. We ALL lack that so much.

          So is there a point to bewailing that we're not omniscient?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @10:45AM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @10:45AM (#897494)

      You're the poster boy for this [wikipedia.org].

      Make sure you post a photo to the Wikipedia page.

      • (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.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 23 2019, @10:51AM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 23 2019, @10:51AM (#897495) Journal

    I've watched a couple of TED talks that were (very) peripherally related recently. Helen Czerski - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ryJK294Psw [youtube.com] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubJ7iqLkXfs [youtube.com]

    Don't mind that she has an odd accent, I think she's British.

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