The mystery at the heart of the Milky Way: After 70 years, astronomers are still arguing about mushroom clouds in the center of the galaxy … was it caused by exploding stars or a black hole that swallowed a gas cloud?
- The bizarre cloud was first noticed in the fifties and is called the North Polar Spur
- Experts put forward several ideas, including exploding stars, but they had no evidence
- Now new images may have helped solve the mystery at the center of our galaxy
Yellow clouds blowing tens of thousands of light years upward from the center of the Milky Way that astonished astrophysicists for more than 70 years may finally have an explanation.
In the fifties, astronauts noticed the celestial mystery that hung above our galactic house and called it the North Pole Spur.
Initially, people believed that it was just a part of the space debris in the sky, but some astronomers have argued that it is part of a growing shock wave.
For its correctness, another cloud would be seen below the Milky Way, but no evidence was found before a space telescope picked up a very dim gamma glow of two large bubbles in 2010.
The yellow clouds blowing from the center of the Milky Way have left experts puzzled for decades.
And now new images of the orbiting telescope, known as eROSITA, have helped shape two concrete opinions.
Based on the energy needed to make the massive mushroom cloud bubbles, experts say the first option was that a wave of thousands of stars suddenly formed and immediately struck.
The alternative option suggests that the supermassive black hole in the heart of our galaxy may have captured a large cloud of gas that passed by and ate half of the cloud while spitting out energy above and below the Milky Way causing the bubbles.
Jun Kataoka, an astronomer at Waseda University in Japan, said of the first idea: ‘The metal flood is very small.
New images from a orbiting telescope have helped astro-experts come up with two ideas for what the yellow clouds are
“So I do not believe that the asteroid activity took place.”
And Peter Predehl, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, added that he agrees that this is probably the second idea:
He said: ‘We did a little analysis.
‘I think now [the debate] is done, more or less. ‘
However, the teams agree that about 15 million to 20 million years ago there was a huge explosion in the center of the galaxy, which we can still see today.
Last year, researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the California Institute of Technology and Santiago High School suggested that the Milky Way may be home to alien civilizations, but most of them are likely dead.
The statement comes from whoever used an updated version of an equation to calculate the probable existence of intelligent life, and determined aliens originated about eight billion years after our galaxy formed.
With these results, the team incorporated the idea that the advancement of science and technology necessarily leads to the destruction of civilizations and because humans have not yet had to make contact outside our planet, scientists now think they know why.