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In its first major result, just over a year after its inauguration, a super-sensitive South African telescope discovered two giant "radio bubbles" above and below the central region of the Milky Way. The features cover a total of 430 parsecs (1,400 light-years), or about 5% of the distance between the solar system and the center of the galaxy.
Bubbles are gaseous structures that can be observed because the electrons that are brewed produce radio waves while they are accelerated by magnetic fields. This activity suggests that bubbles are the remains of a hot gas energy eruption there are several million years, say the authors of an article describing the features, published in Nature September 11th.
One possible explanation is that the super-massive black hole in the center of the galaxy has undergone a period of intense material ingestion that has caused the explosion, say the researchers. Another event could be a "starburst" event – the almost simultaneous formation and death by death of about 100 big stars. The shockwaves of their explosions could have combined to make a hole in the thick interstellar matter of the central region of the galaxy.
Oliver Pfuhl, astronomer at the European Observatory in Garching, Germany, explains that starburst and black hole activities could have been at stake or even reinforce each other. And researchers have heard of a starburst that took place in the area about 7 million years ago. "It's interesting to connect the radio bubble to this star-forming event," he says.
Researchers working with the MeerKAT radio telescope from South Africa, a forerunner of what will be the world's largest radio telescope, Square Kilometer Array (SKA), have discovered the bubbles when they created an image of the Galactic center to celebrate the inauguration of the observatory and test their conduct. Fernando Camilo, scientific director of the observatory, says the radio astronomer Fernando Camilo, a new establishment from April 2018. As a rule, researchers take years to operate a new observatory and to produce the science with him. But with MeerKAT, they were stunned by the fluidity of things. "It worked from the start," says Camilo.
The bubbles could also solve an old radioastronomy puzzle. It is possible that electrons that accelerate inward are the source of shiny "filaments" of matter that extend tens of parsecs that extend from the galactic center, seen for the first time in 1984. Still larger bubbles, exceeding those seen by MeerKAT, have already been seen part of the gamma rays of the spectrum, and could have a similar origin.
The MeerKAT, worth 4.4 billion rand (330 million US dollars), includes 64 satellite dishes 13.5 meters in diameter each, at a remote site in the province of Northern Cape. It will form the core of the South African SKA, which is expected to be built in the 2020s. The second part of the observatory will be in Australia.
This article is reproduced with permission and was published on September 11, 2019.
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