Best printers for Home

Best Mixer Grinder

Best wired Earphones

Best 43 Inch TV in India

Best Wi Fi Routers

Best Home Theatre in India

Smart Watch under 5000

Best Laptops for Education

Best Laptop for Students

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.aau3181">K. Ulaczyk / J. Skowron / OGLE / Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw</a></span></p><p class="caption">Warsaw Telescope and Milky Way Cepheids discovered by the OGLE survey.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul class="summary-list"><li>Two giant bubbles of radiation - each up to 1,400 light-years across - are <a href="https://www.businessinsider.co.za/meerkat-telescope-ska-square-kilometre-array-telescope-gaint-bubbles-radiation-2019-9">expanding outward from the center of the Milky Way</a>.</li><li>A new study describes these never-before-seen bubbles, spotted for the first time by <a href="https://www.businessinsider.co.za/on-friday-sa-unveils-the-r44-billion-meerkat-telescope-heres-what-its-for-2018-7">South Africa's new MeerKAT telescope</a>.</li><li>Astronomers suspect the <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=5&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjfxdDyrc7kAhVlzlkKHVZeDkwQxfQBMAR6BAgFEAc&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.in%2Fmilky-ways-quiet-wimpy-black-hole-is-getting-hungrier-and-brighter%2Farticleshow%2F71098006.cms&amp;usg=AOvVaw1jpdkd5yLYbuEVutMJ8sz6">supermassive black hole</a> at the center of our galaxy entered into a "feeding frenzy" a few million years ago, swallowing massive lumps of gas and matter, and the bubbles are the black hole's consequent belch of radiation. </li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories</a>.</li></ul><p><span style="color: #222222;">The region at the center of our galaxy is still full of mysteries, but astronomers have just found a clue to its past: Huge, radio-emitting bubbles, extending 700 light-years either side of the galactic plane.</span></p><p>They could be, the researchers believe, the result of a huge eruption from our galaxy's supermassive <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/black-holes" target="_blank" title="black hole" rel="noopener">black hole</a>, Sagittarius A*. Millions of years ago that eruption would have punched into the interstellar medium in opposite directions from the supermassive black hole.</p><p>If "galactic bubbles" sound a bit familiar, it's important to clarify that these are <em>not</em> the <a href="https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/constellations/pages/bubbles.html">huge gamma-ray bubbles</a> discovered by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in 2010, nicknamed "Fermi bubbles," spanning above and below the galactic plane for a total distance of 50,000 light-years.</p><p>These latest bubbles, described <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1532-5">in a new study</a> in the journal Nature, are something new, and astronomers haven't seen them before. But they are amongst the biggest structures at the center of our galaxy, and they reveal new information about the dynamics of our galactic nucleus.</p><p>"The center of our galaxy is relatively calm when compared to other galaxies with very active central <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/black-holes" target="_blank" title="black holes" rel="noopener">black holes</a>," <a href="http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-09-11-towering-balloon-features-discovered-near-centre-milky-way">astrophysicist Ian Heywood of the University of Oxford said</a>.</p><p>"Even so, the Milky Way's central black hole can become uncharacteristically active, flaring up as it periodically devours massive clumps of dust and gas. It's possible that one such feeding frenzy triggered powerful outbursts that inflated this previously unseen feature," Heywood added.</p><h2>An accidental discovery by a South African telescope</h2><p>Hints of the structures <a href="https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984Natur.310..557Y/abstract">first emerged in the 1980s</a>, when astronomer and physicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University and colleagues discovered something strange in the galactic center: long, thin, highly organised and highly magnetized filaments of gas, tens of light-years long and just one light-year wide, emitting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation">synchrotron</a> radio waves.</p><p>These strange structures hadn't been observed anywhere else, and their origin <a href="https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2017-35">remained a mystery</a> for decades.</p><p>But something changed. The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory's <a href="http://www.ska.ac.za/science-engineering/meerkat/">MeerKAT telescope</a> was built, consisting of 64 interconnected radio antennae that offer "unprecedented" sensitivity in radio wavelengths, perfectly positioned in the Southern Hemisphere to take deep images of the galactic center.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MeerKAT_Radio_Telescope.jpg">Morganoshell/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></p><p class="caption">A photograph of the MeerKAT Radio Telescope, taken March 2016.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>The international team turned the telescope on the heart of the Milky Way. And, for the first time, they were able to see the structures of these radio bubbles, faint but detectable, amidst the incredibly radio-bright glare in the region.</p><p>The event that caused it could be responsible for accelerating the electrons that resulted in the synchrotron emission observed in the filaments in the galactic center.</p><p>"The radio bubbles discovered with MeerKAT now shed light on the origin of the filaments," <a href="http://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2019/09/milky-way/">Yusef-Zadeh said</a>. "Almost all of the more than 100 filaments are confined by the radio bubbles."</p><h2>'A staggeringly powerful event ... near our galaxy's central black hole'</h2><p>The entire hourglass-shaped structure extends 1,400 light-years, and is unusually symmetrical. This symmetry provides some clues as to what created them; the size, constrained by the speed of light, puts an upper limit of a few million years on their age.</p><p>"The shape and symmetry of what we have observed strongly suggests that a staggeringly powerful event happened a few million years ago very near our galaxy's central black hole," astronomer William Cotton from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory said.</p><p>This eruption was possibly triggered by vast amounts of interstellar gas falling in on the black hole, or a massive burst of star formation which sent shockwaves careening through the galactic center.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#mediaviewer/File:PIA16695-BlackHole-Corona-20130227.jpg">NASA/JPL/Caltech</a></span></p><p class="caption">Artist's impression of a black hole.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>"In effect, this inflated energetic bubbles in the hot, ionized gas near the galactic center, energizing it and generating radio waves which we could eventually detect here on Earth," Cotton added.</p><p>Although the radio bubbles are smaller and less energetic than the Fermi bubbles - it's possible that similar events created both sets of bubbles, the researchers said.</p><p>It's even possible that both sets of bubbles were created by a linked series of events. Perhaps future observations across a range of wavelengths can tell us more.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/event-horizon-telescope-black-hole-snaps-first-image-messier-87-2019-4">Here's how astronomers took the first image of a black hole that's located 55 million light years away</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

The black hole at the center of our galaxy just belched two giant bubbles of radiation

<ul class="summary-list"><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/19th-century-astronomy-drawings-match-nasa-images-today-2021-9">Astronomers</a> detected mysterious <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-developing-plan-to-build-radio-telescope-on-the-moon-2021-4">radio waves</a> from the center of the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/milky-way-single-photo-12-years-constellations-supernova-2021-3">galaxy</a> that vary dramatically and seem to shut off at random.</li><li>The waves' origin is unknown, so they hint at the existence of a new type of celestial object.</li></ul><p>Mysterious <keyword id="12323603" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="radio-waves" source="Orion">radio waves</keyword> are emanating from the heart of our <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-hubble-space-telescope-spiral-galaxy-light-years-away-earth-2021-8">galaxy</a>, and astronomers don't know what's making them.</p><p>All celestial objects emit radio waves - planets, stars, dead stars, and even asteroids. But researchers at the University of Sydney recently detected radio signals that do not match any known types. The waves, originating near the center of the <keyword id="12323604" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="milky-way" source="Orion">Milky Way</keyword>, don't seem to be coming from any kind of star, planet, or space rock that scientists have seen before.</p><p>Even stranger, the strength of this signal has waxed and waned dramatically over just a few months. Most objects in the <keyword id="11921801" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="galaxy" source="Orion">galaxy</keyword>, by contrast, don't change much year to year - and therefore nor do their radio waves.</p><p>"The signal switches on and off apparently at random. We've never seen anything like it," Ziteng Wang, the lead author of the new study and a PhD student in physics at the University of Sydney, said in a <a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2021/10/12/strange-radiowaves-galactic-centre-askap-j173608-2-321635.html">press release</a>.</p><p>A paper describing the discovery was <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360">published</a> Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journals. In it, Wang and his coauthors concluded that the mysterious source of this radio signal "may represent part of a new class of objects."</p><h2>The radio signal disappeared for months, reemerged suddenly, then vanished again</h2><div type="image" title="radio wave animation shows distant bright light sending intermittent spirals towards earth" height="640" width="640" msid="87060746" hostid="261"></div><p>Whatever the mysterious object is that's responsible for this phenomenon, it was emitting strong radio waves through most of 2020. The researchers detected six signals over nine months, using the ASKAP radio telescope in western Australia.</p><p>After that, the team tried to find the object in visible light, but they came up empty-handed. They couldn't find it in X-ray or infrared light, either.</p><p>So they switched back to radio waves, at first using Australia's Parkes radio telescope, but they lost the source of the signal and couldn't detect anything for a while. Then they turned to a different radio telescope - the MeerKAT observatory in South Africa - and observed the area for 15 minutes every few weeks.</p><p>Finally, they caught the radio signal once more, but it disappeared in a single day. That was strange, since the six signals they'd caught with ASKAP had each lasted for weeks.</p><p>"This object was unique in that it started out invisible, became bright, faded away, and then reappeared. This behavior was extraordinary," Tara Murphy, a professor at the University of Sydney who is Wang's PhD supervisor, said in the release.</p><p>Murphy and Wang are not talking about visual brightness - a "bright" radio signal is just a strong one.</p><p>"The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100," Wang said in the release.</p><p>In an email, Murphy told Insider "that is part of what makes it unusual."</p><p>"Objects that are hot (e.g. stars) typically emit visible light, which is why we ruled out a normal star as one of the possible interpretations for this object," she wrote. "It could be a very very cool star that is too weak to detect the visible light from but has bright radio flares."</p><p>The mysterious radio signal shares some traits with signals from a class of objects called "galactic center radio transients" that were discovered in the 2000s. But researchers don't know much about those objects either, except that they emit low-frequency, highly polarized radio waves with no detectable X-rays. Still, the new signal has properties that don't match those from the radio transients.</p><p>"We don't really understand those sources, anyway, so this adds to the mystery," Wang's co-supervisor, David Kaplan from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said in the release.</p>

Mysterious radio waves are radiating from an unknown object at the heart of the Milky Way, astronomers say

<br /><ul><li>Astronomers have spotted two huge bubbles going on for hundreds of light years, above and below the center of the <keyword id="410481" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Milky-Way-Galaxy">Milky Way galaxy</keyword>.<br /></li><li>They form an hourglass-like shape, which indicates that they are a result of a very violent explosion that took place near the Milky Way's <keyword id="6409890" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="black-hole">black hole</keyword>.<br /></li><li>Each of the bubbles also contains hundreds of filaments of unknown origin that are only found around the black hole and nowhere else in the Milky Way.<br /></li></ul>One of the largest features ever seen, has been spotted right at the center of our very own galaxy, the Milky Way.<br /><br />It's pair of massive radio-emitting bubbles that stretch for 700 light years above and below the center of the galaxy.<br /><br /><div type="image" title="MeerKAT_composite_print-1024x614" msid="71106402" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Radio image of the center of the Milky Way with a portion of the MeerKAT telescope array in the foreground&amp;lt;br /&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;"></div>

<br />Scientists believe that this could be the result of an enormous energetic burst that erupted near the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/milky-ways-quiet-wimpy-black-hole-is-getting-hungrier-and-brighter/articleshow/71098006.cms">Milky Way's supermassive black hole</a> hundreds of years ago, according to their study published in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02726-x">Nature</a>.<br /><br />The bubbles had not been spotted so far because their signal melded with all the other bright radio emissions from the center of the galaxy. <br /><br />In order to observe the phenomenon accurately, the internal team of astronomers had to take out all other background noise using the MeerKAT Telescope at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO).<br /><br /><strong>Bubbles with an 'hourglass' figure<br /></strong><br />The radio bubbles are identical when its comes to shape and size, according to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (<a href="https://public.nrao.edu/news/2019-balloon-features-galactic-center/">NRAO</a>).<br /><br /><div type="image" title="bubbles" msid="71106412" hostid="261"></div>

<br />Because of bubbles' 'hourglass'-like shape, astronomers were able to determine that such similarities can only mean that they were formed from a violent eruption. The eruption would have moved quickly, ending as quickly as it started — punching through space in opposite directions.<br /><br />"This eruption was possibly triggered by vast amounts of interstellar gas falling in on the black hole, or a massive burst of star formation which sent shockwaves careening through the galactic center," stated William Cotton, an astronomer with NRAO and co-author of the study.<br /><br />The resulting hot and ionized gas inflated the bubbles, energizing them and generating radio waves that can now be detected from Earth, according to Cotton.<br /><br /><strong>Solving the mystery of the Milky Way's <keyword id="2104882" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="20" keywordseo="supermassive-black-hole">supermassive black hole</keyword><br /></strong><br />The region that surrounds the Milky Way's <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/our-very-own-black-hole-in-the-milky-way-doesnt-quite-eat-up-everything/articleshow/69684893.cms">supermassive black hole</a> is quite different from the rest of the galaxy. There's also a lot about it that scientists are yet to understand.<br /><br />One of mysteries are very long and narrow filaments that aren't found anywhere else except in that region. They were first discovered 35 years ago and show up at radio structures that are tens of light years long and only one light year wide.<br /><br />But there might be a new clue to help find the answer. Each of the radio bubbles spotted contain more than a hundred of these filaments.<br /><br />Since the bubbles originated from a big explosion around the Milky Way's black hole, it's possible that its also where these filaments were formed. It's at least responsible for accelerating the electrons required to produce the radio emission from the magnetized filaments.<br /><br />This phenomenon also lends itself to understanding how other black holes in the universe operate — especially ones in galaxy's than are similar to the Milky Way.<br /><br /><strong>See also:<br /></strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/milky-ways-supermassive-black-hole-just-lit-up/articleshow/70671308.cms">There was a big spark — 75 times brighter than usual — from the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/our-very-own-black-hole-in-the-milky-way-doesnt-quite-eat-up-everything/articleshow/69684893.cms">Our very own black hole in the Milky Way doesn't quite eat up 'everything'</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/milky-ways-quiet-wimpy-black-hole-is-getting-hungrier-and-brighter/articleshow/71098006.cms">Milky Way's 'quiet wimpy' black hole is getting hungrier and brighter</a><br />

Two massive bubbles stretch 700 light years above and below the center of the Milky Way

You Searched For "MeerKAT radio telescope" and got 3 results

The black hole at the center of our galaxy just belched two giant bubbles of radiation

Michelle Starr

Mysterious radio waves are radiating from an unknown object at the heart of the Milky Way, astronomers say

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

Two massive bubbles stretch 700 light years above and below the center of the Milky Way

Prabhjote Gill

Popular Keywords

Buying Guides