Huge gamma-ray bubbles

[Saint in Paradise]

found extending from Milky Way

 

 

The unexpected discovery suggests a colossal event in our galaxy's past, releasing energy equivalent

to 100,000 exploding stars. But scientists don't yet know what that event might have been.

 

This NASA illustration depicts the twin bubbles of high-energy gamma rays protruding from the Milky Way,

which are believed to be nearly as big as the galaxy itself. (NASA / November 9, 2010)

 

Startled astronomers said Tuesday they had discovered two massive bubbles of gamma-ray energy

extending 25,000 light-years above and below the plane of the Milky Way galaxy like a squat hourglass.

 

"They're big, they're sharp-edged and they contain a lot of energy," astrophysicist Douglas Finkbeiner of

the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said in a news conference. Finkbeiner led

a team that used data from NASA's 2-year-old orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to discover the bubbles

hiding behind a fog of gamma rays.

 

Link to rest of this story :-

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-1110-energy-bubbles-20101110%2C0%2C5062292.story

 

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[Whitey Grandad]

That's very interesting. From the illustration it looks like they are an inherent part of the structure of the galaxy. I wonder if othe galaxies have them?

[dubai_phil]

Meh, everyone knows that's what happens when you drop a Warp Core close to an expanding singularity in a Deep Space Mining ship from Romulus that has come back in time.

 

Don't these guys ever watch movies?