14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists at the Clemson University have been recently awarded $244,000 in order to continue studying data from various ground- and space-based telescopes, which supply an almost uninterrupted feed of a very weird emission coming from the center of our galaxy. NASA asked the astrophysicists at Clemson to try to establish what the source of the antimatter emissions was, and how come it was visible from the Earth, when all theories said that it shouldn't be.
Gamma rays, the main emissions that have been recently recorded, are formed by an energy approximately one thousand times more powerful than X-rays, and represent only the visible light portion of that energy. They are triggered by antimatter and matter coming together, usually in the central portions of galaxies. In the Milky Way, they originate from the formation's central regions, located somewhere in the Southern hemisphere.
“We're not surprised to see this emission from the Milky Way's disk. We know that massive stars explode as supernovae there, fusing new elements from lighter ones. Such explosions long ago made the oxygen and iron in our blood and the calcium in our bones, along with most other heavy elements,” Mark Leising, an astronomy professor at the Clemson University and also the main investigator of the new study, says.
“Some of these elements are radioactive and produce antimatter positrons when they decay. What is surprising is how bright this emission is from the center of the galaxy. It is not coming just from the very center, where a black hole lurks that is two million times the Sun's mass, but from a region a few thousand light-years across surrounding the center,” the scientist adds.
In addition to answering NASA's questions, the new research that is due to begin soon and bound to combine data from numerous American and European observatories might also generate some spin-off benefits, as Leising believes. “Development of these detectors and analysis techniques aided in the development of PET (positron emission tomography) scanners, in which patients ingest radioactive elements that decay and emit antimatter. We are doing much the same thing, except that we have to sit back 25,000 light years to measure the gamma rays,” he concludes.