Two giant bubbles spew out gamma beams that appear in the center of the Milky Way and astronomers don't know where they were born.
A pair of giant bubbles between the Milky Way. (Photo: NASA).
Fermi Space Telescope of the US Aerospace Agency (NASA) discovered the two bubbles above.National Geographic says they are 25,000 light-years long and stretch north-south from the center of the Milky Way. From the past, astronomers have never met such objects.
' Humans always think we know a lot about the Milky Way. But what we see shows that there are still many interesting things waiting for us , 'said David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton University in the US.
Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomical professor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US, says that two giant bubbles are some form of energy. However, he did not know where that kind of energy was created.
Gamma rays are the form of light with the highest energy. In the universe it is often born by intense events such as supernova explosions. Black holes and neutron stars also regularly release gamma rays.
Two giant bubbles are made up of hot air and have electric charge. The energy they release is equivalent to the energy of several hundred thousand stars exploding. Finkbeiner said that two giant bubbles could be the rest of a star-forming region between the Milky Way. If a giant constellation formed a few million years ago, they could die at the same time and create a series of massive supernova explosions.
' In that case, the two bubbles are the energy that the stars accumulate over millions of years ,' Finkbeiner said.
Another theory, according to the professor, is that a black hole is sleeping in the middle of the Milky Way that has been operating for a short time.
Scientists agree that a supermassive black hole is located in the center of the Milky Way. Its size increases gradually thanks to continuous suction of matter.
When black holes in the universe suck matter to increase size, they often spew out high-energy radiation streams. Astronomers have found black holes that work in the universe, but they have not found evidence of black hole activity in the Milky Way.
' So two giant bubbles could be the first evidence of black hole activity in the center of the Milky Way ,' Finkbeiner said.
The Princeton University team eliminates the hypothesis whereby two bubbles are a form of dark matter.
Many scientists believe that dark matter atoms destroy each other when colliding, releasing new particles with enormous energy. It is thought that dark matter exists at the core of galaxies. So searching for the remnants of dark matter atoms is the only way to prove the existence of dark matter.
Watch the video illustrating the release of gamma rays
According to NASA.