He he

I'm sure this was touched on before but for those of you who didn't see it.....

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The Milky Way Has Giant Bubbles at Its Center

Astronomers have found radio-emitting structures jutting out from our galaxy’s black hole.

Farhad Yusef-Zadeh was observing the center of the Milky Way galaxy in radio waves, looking for the presence of faint stars, when he saw it: a spindly structure giving off its own radio emissions. What the astronomer had mistaken for an imperfection turned out to be an entire population of cosmic structures at the heart of the galaxy. The menagerie of filaments is clustered around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

But the mystery filament kept showing up, and soon Yusef-Zadeh found others. What the astronomer had mistaken for an imperfection turned out to be an entire population of cosmic structures at the heart of the galaxy.

More than 100 filaments have been detected since Yusef-Zadeh’s first encounter in the early 1980s. 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. The menagerie of filaments is clustered around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. “They haven’t been found elsewhere,” says Yusef-Zadeh, a physics and astronomy professor at Northwestern University.

Their origins remained a mystery, too, until now.

New observations of the galactic center have revealed a pair of giant bubbles at the center of the Milky Way that give off radio emissions, according to recent research published in Nature. The bubbles stretch outward from the black hole and extend into space in opposite directions. The billowy lobes resemble the two halves of an hourglass, with the black hole nestled at its waist. And the filaments that Yusef-Zadeh discovered all those years ago are encased within.

These bubbles are big. Top to bottom, the cosmic hourglass measures 1,400 light-years, a distance that, if converted into miles, comprises of a dizzying number of zeros; one light-year—the distance that light covers in an Earth year—is about 6 trillion miles. The black hole, by comparison, is a pinprick of light.

The discovery suggests that the sinuous filaments arose as part of a larger structure. “We’ve long thought that this was the case, but we haven’t been able to image the proof,” says Cornelia Lang, an astronomer at the University of Iowa who studies these filaments, and who was not involved in the bubble research.

The new observations come from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, an array of dozens of dishes that work together to generate a large field of view. The facility, which began operations last year, is located in one of the best places on the planet to study the heart of the Milky Way; the galactic center passes right overhead and remains observable for hours.

But it’s not a straight shot. Our solar system resides near one of the Milky Way’s shimmery spirals, and there are about 25,000 light-years of gas, dust, and other cosmic matter sitting between us and the galactic center. To observe that faraway place, astronomers must observe in forms of electromagnetic radiation other than visible light, like radio. “We have to piece together a picture of the center of the galaxy using wavelengths that are not the kind that our eye sees,” Lang says.