{"id":4489,"date":"2010-11-12T23:09:46","date_gmt":"2010-11-13T03:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=4489"},"modified":"2010-11-13T00:16:49","modified_gmt":"2010-11-13T04:16:49","slug":"who-knew-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/11\/12\/who-knew-2\/","title":{"rendered":"who knew?…"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Bubbles of Energy Are Found in Galaxy<\/a>
New York Times<\/strong>
By DENNIS OVERBYE
November 9, 2010<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Something big is going on at the center of the galaxy, and astronomers are happy to say they don’t know what it is. A group of scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope said Tuesday that they had discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The bubbles, they said at a news conference and in a paper to be published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal<\/a><\/strong>, extend 25,000 light years up and down from each side of the galaxy and contain the energy equivalent to 100,000 supernova explosions…<\/p>\n

One of the most surprised was Dr. Finkbeiner. A year ago he was part of a group led by Gregory Dobler of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., that said it had discerned the existence of a mysterious fog of high-energy particles buzzing around the center of the Milky Way<\/a><\/strong>. The particles manifested themselves as a haze of extra energy after all the known sources of gamma rays — the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation — had been subtracted from Fermi data that had recently been made public. <\/div>\n

At the time, Dr. Finkbeiner and his colleagues speculated that the haze was produced by dark matter. The center of the galaxy is home to all manner of wild and woolly high-energy phenomena, including a gigantic black hole and violently spinning pulsars, but cosmological theories also suggest that dark matter would be concentrated there. Collisions of dark matter particles, the theory goes, could produce showers of gamma rays. <\/p>\n

But in the follow-up analysis, the haze — besides being bigger than Dr. Finkbeiner and his colleagues had thought — turned out to have sharp boundaries, like, well, a bubble. Dark matter, according to the prevailing theory, should be more diffuse. “Dark matter has been there billions of years,” Dr. Finkbeiner explained. “If something has been going on for billions of years, you wouldn’t expect a sharp edge.” He and the other scientists said this did not mean that dark matter was not there clogging the center of the galaxy, but that it would be harder to see. <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Following politics and the economy is getting kind of depressing, so I thought I’d move to something that wasn’t such a downer. Astronomy is just such a thing. Those scientists had that dinky little picture up there from their Gamma-Ray telescope. And from that, they deduced something that looks like this – great bubbles of energy as big as the Galaxy itself [making our financial bubbles seem trivial]:<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
So they superimpose their radiation maps on another kind of picture of the center of the Milky Way [radiotelescope sky map] and come up with this one…<\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
… that shows a Galactic Wind [red squares outline] blowing off of these enormous energy bubbles [green dashes]. See, that’s why Astronomy is a better choice of things to be interested in than the front page of the Newspaper. All of this action happened >25,000 years ago because that’s how long it took for the light from the center of our Galaxy to get here so we could see it.  So it’s fascinating, but irrelevant. We need more fascinating but irrelevant things to think about these days. The contemporary stuff is too hard…<\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bubbles of Energy Are Found in GalaxyNew York TimesBy DENNIS OVERBYENovember 9, 2010 Something big is going on at the center of the galaxy, and astronomers are happy to say they don’t know what it is. A group of scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope said Tuesday that they had discovered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}