What are the two mysterious bubbles floating near Earth about?

The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope discovered in 2010 two gigantic structures on either side of our galaxy. These objects extend 25,000 light-years and have been dubbed “Fermi bubbles.”

These regions emit gamma rays around the center of the Milky Way, but their origin it was always a mystery to scientists. Now, however, a scientist from Tokyo Metropolitan University has found the answer.



Professor Yutaka Fujita, using X-ray observations from the Suzaku satellite, found that the chances were high that Fermi bubbles were produced by fast winds ledges that blew at 1000 km per second for 10 million years.

Of course, these are not winds as we would experience them on Earth, but of streams of highly charged particles that travel at high speed and propagate through space. These winds travel outward and interact with the surrounding “halo gas,” causing a “reverse shock” that creates a characteristic temperature spike. The Fermi bubbles correspond to the volume within this inverse shock front, as published by the site Esquire.

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