Vast, mysterious structure discovered at the heart of our galaxy

[Swede]

Two enormous, gamma-ray-emitting structures are bubbling out of the center of our galaxy. And astronomers have no idea what caused them.

These bubbles, which stretch an astonishing 25,000 light years above and below the galactic plane, are invisible to the naked eye. But astronomers working with data from the Fermi space telescope, which detects gamma rays, were able to see the structures. Though our galaxy is bathed in a light haze of gamma rays, these structures stood out sharply - gamma rays were zooming out of them at a tremendous rate, and the bubbles also appeared to have sharply defined edges.

http://io9.com/5685847/vast-mysterious-structure-discovered-at-the-heart-of-our-galaxy

[doc03]

1. The Enterprise n/t

[aquart]

2. Ooooooh.

[tridim]

3. Galaxies have to be fundamental

They're just too strange and common to be otherwise.

I wonder if our galaxy's dark matter uses this gamma ray energy for something?

[ixion]

4. "Oh my God, it's full of stars"

[HysteryDiagnosis]

5. Similar if not the same...

http://sync.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=8900109&mesg_id=8900109

[tridim]

6. Someone posted this edit as a joke..

But I think it's very interesting to look at it this way. Are the orbiting stars the main part of our galaxy? Or are the bubbles the main part? What is all this energy doing to virtual particle pairs? Imparting mass?

[sofa king]

8. It looks just like a 2p "barbell" electron orbit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_configuration



...which in turn resembles a point dipole



I'm sure there's an underlying reason for that, but heck if I know what it is.

[tridim]

9. You get it. I think we're getting real close to Unification.

Simulations are now showing two orbiting black holes behaving like an electron cloud around a nucleus, with jumping energy levels and everything. Crazy stuff.

[sofa king]

11. I guess a black hole pretty much is a point dipole, isn't it?

I don't know. I have just about as much luck understanding the cyrillic abstract of this paper as I do the English one.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/w2394g2x27v2703n/

Or maybe our galaxy is a giant boron atom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boron

[Eddie Haskell]

7. Another possibility

"One possibility includes a particle jet from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. In many other galaxies, astronomers see fast particle jets powered by matter falling toward a central black hole. While there is no evidence the Milky Way's black hole has such a jet today, it may have in the past. The bubbles also may have formed as a result of gas outflows from a burst of star formation, perhaps the one that produced many massive star clusters in the Milky Way's center several million years ago."

Or, as more and more gas gets sucked into the black hole, two jets about to burst their bubbles. Hope we're not in the line of fire.

[txlibdem]

10. This is exactly why you CAN'T leave your StarGate sitting around any old where

Sheesh! When will you kids start picking up after yourselves?!?