
The Milky Way Has Giant Bubbles at Its Center - joubert
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/milky-way-galaxy-bubbles-meerkat/598552/
======
forgotpwd16
E-print can be found at
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05534](https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05534) .

Some years ago something similar was found in the form of Fermi bubbles; a
discovery given the Bruno Rossi Prize. The difference is the frequencies that
the structures were found and their size. Fermi bubbles were identified by
γ-ray imagining and are far more massive (many thousands of light years in
size); both put together makes them far more energetic as well.

An interesting part with this discovery is the correspondence between radio
and X-ray emissions in this bipolar radio structure. The radio bubbles appear
to exactly bound the plasma detected using X-rays.

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mkl
I found a picture of the filaments with some related information:
[https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-
astronomy/chapter/the...](https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-
astronomy/chapter/the-center-of-the-galaxy/)

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lolc
> Our supermassive black hole is in a quiet chapter of its life, but
> astronomers suspect that it has previously experienced this active phase.

That's what always freaks me out about astronomy. We don't know what
Sagittarius A is up to at the moment. We will know in 26400 years.

~~~
dTal
If it makes you feel any better, the concept of "at the moment" doesn't really
have a meaning at relativistic distances - simultaneity isn't defined. In any
sense that practically matters, what Sagittarius A is up to "right now" in our
frame of reference is what we see it doing in our telescopes. Although there
is a sense in which it happened 26400 years ago, any event further into the
future than that is, for us, just as nonexistent as next week.

Ironically, HN seems to be confused as to whether you made this comment 15
minutes or 1 hour ago, depending on whether I'm in "Add Comment" or the main
thread. Different frames of reference, perhaps?

(edit: all comments are incorrectly marked as being 20 minutes old in the main
thread) (edit2: and my comment is only visible to me, apparently. HN is
broken.) (edit3: huge lag between edits and public visibility of said edits
from a non-logged-in browser)

~~~
bcaa7f3a8bbc
> _huge lag between edits and public visibility of said edits from a non-
> logged-in browser_

As the saying goes, "there are 2 great unsolved problems in computer science:,
naming objects, cache invalidation, and off by one errors."

In case you haven't noticed, to reduce server pressure, a logged-in user sees
comments in real time, but a guest only sees the cached version of the page
that only updates slowly. When Hacker News sees an explosive amount of
traffic, logging out is a way to help. The last time it happened was when
Donald Trump was elected.

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rubslopes
> 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.

Humm it seems we have gone full circle.

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mirimir
So are these basically remnants of jets?

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hateful
Isn't this just a quasar, but on a larger scale?

~~~
ben_w
It’s a quasar on a significantly _smaller_ scale.

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angel_j
I speculate that these bubbles (and the other bubbles) are gigantic elementary
particles emerging from the black hole.

~~~
mkl
That would require a truly absurd distortion of the definition of "elementary
particle". In particular, you'd need elementary particles to be able to
contain enormous numbers of other elementary particles (which makes the term
pretty meaningless).

Why do you think such a thing?

~~~
angel_j
The Tau lepton is ~3000x more massive than the Electron lepton. I see no
reason to doubt that there are more massive leptons or bosons. I speculate
that they can be predicted along something called the Regge Scale.

I imagine the black hole behaves like a supermassive accelerator, and the
energy actually escapes as extra-super-massive "elementary particles" which we
can't build telescopes big enough to sense, and basically flow through our own
bosonic field like bigger waves. (Perhaps we can see them decay-spiraling
through the "gas clouds".)

And at various harmonic reaches of these singular mass-energy units, they
decay into the more common and stable particles, feeding stars and fuzzing up
Magellan.

Another reasoning: When you put quarks together, and put the results together
with some leptons, you get more massive things like atoms, molecules, and all
"matter". Quarks are stackable. Leptons are cumulative. The Higgs Boson is
already very massive, and isn't stable on Earth, but maybe it is stable in the
black hole, and can scale to whatever mass the fabric of that energy-space
requires.

Personally, I think the black hole ultra-collides quarks and leptons into
highest energy "elementary particles", and that energy feeds these bubbles,
which can be described as ultimo-massive bosons decaying, into lesser boson
and also leptons and quarks, far out away from the black hole. I would not be
surprised if one day it was found that astral bodies tended to form along some
predictable distances from galactic center; where the bosonic field is
decaying very predictably into the stuff that fuels the creation of those same
astral bodies.

~~~
op00to
I have no idea is this is bullshit or not but I really enjoyed reading or sand
totally can picture what you’re saying!

