Enormous X-ray bubbles balloon from the center of the Milky Way

Two giant, mysterious bubbles spew from the Milky Way’s heart, and now it appears the bubbles may have doubles.

Scientists have known for a decade that two bubbles of charged particles, or plasma, flank the plane of the Milky Way. Those structures, known as the Fermi bubbles after the telescope that detected them, are visible in high-energy light called gamma rays (SN: 11/9/10).

But now, the eROSITA X-ray telescope has revealed larger bubbles, seen in X-rays. The X-ray bubbles extend about 45,000 light-years above and below the center of the galaxy, researchers report online December 9 in Nature.

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P. PREDEHL ET AL/NATURE 2020

Bubbles spill from the center of the Milky Way, seen in both gamma rays (red) and X-rays (blue).

The newly found X-ray bubbles are even bigger than the previously known gamma-ray bubbles.

Both sets of bubbles extend above and below the plane of the galaxy (central horizontal line).

Source / Image Courtesy

Using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scientists have recently discovered a gigantic, mysterious structure in our galaxy.

This feature looks like a pair of bubbles extending above and below our galaxy's center. Each lobe is 25,000 light-years tall and the whole structure may be only a few million years old.