Two of the strangest, most colossal structures in the Milky Way may have formed in a 100,000-year-long explosion at our galaxy’s center, new research suggests.
Those structures — named the Fermi bubbles and eROSITA bubbles after the respective telescopes that discovered them — straddle the Milky Way’s center in an enormous hourglass shape, with one set of bubbles stretching more than 25,000 light-years above the galactic plane, and the other set stretching just as far below it.
The two sets of bubbles overlap with each other, but they appear to be made of fundamentally different stuff. The Fermi bubbles, filled with ultra-fast particles called cosmic rays, can only be spotted by telescopes that detect high-energy gamma rays, while the eROSITA bubbles — filled with blazing hot gas — are only visible as X-rays. Scientists dispute their origins, but one thing about the bubbles is clear: They are the result of an ancient and powerful explosion that ignited somewhere near the galaxy’s center long ago.
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