14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers using a NASA telescope managed to identify a pair of gamma-ray bubbles being produced at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Early analyses of the latest data seem to indicate that the structures are being produced by the supermassive black hole that occupies the galactic core.
The twin structures were found in the latest images produced by the NASA Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which analyzes the sky in the most energetic wavelengths the Universe can produce.
Each of the hourglass-shapes bubbles extends way above the galactic disk. They have a length of about 65,000 light-years, which is really massive. The entire Milky Way has 100,000 light-years in diameter.
Scientists who got a chance to look over the new readings say that the radiation are most definitely not caused by dark matter. Theoretically, this form of matter can produce gamma-rays when its particles meet and annihilate each other.
Physicists say that dark matter is made up of weak-interacting massive particles (WIMP), which annihilate one another when they meet. This process is believed to generate gamma-rays. But the bubbles in the Milky Way do not appear to be produced in a diffuse, background manner.
At this point, expert Douglas Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) favors two theories on the formation of the gamma-ray bubbles over any others, Daily Galaxy reports.
The first is that the structures were blown out of the galactic core when stars that were produced some 10 million years ago exploded. Given the location, these stars were most probably very massive, which means that they only lived very short lives before exploding.
The second explanation is that the bubbles were created about 100,000 years ago, as the massive black hole powering up the core of our galaxy gulped up an amount of material equaling 100 solar masses.
When this happened, it belched out high-speed jets of energetic radiations, the CfA team believes.
Determining precisely what happened there is very complicated, since the entire galactic core is concealed by huge layers of dust and gas. Optical and ultraviolet observatories cannot pierce this defensive shields.
On the other hand, radio, infrared, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes can easily do this. They are the only types of observatories that can be used to look at the galactic core of the Milky Way.