Huge bubbles of plasma billowing out from the Milky Way’s center might contain scraps from all over the galaxy — and beyond.
A new look at gas clouds in the galaxy’s Fermi bubbles shows that the clouds contain stuff from the galaxy’s starry disk and from some mysterious other source. The finding could shed light on how galaxies in general live and die, astronomers report July 18 in Nature Astronomy.
The Fermi bubbles are giant blobs of plasma, tens of thousands of light-years tall, that extend on either side of the Milky Way’s galactic disk. When the bubbles were discovered in 2010, astronomers thought they could have been formed by newborn stars (SN: 11/9/10). These days, many astronomers are instead convinced the bubbles could have been blown by a massive, long-ago burp emitted from the galaxy’s supermassive black hole.
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