MADRID, 10 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The first all-sky map from the eROSITA X-ray space telescope has revealed a huge spherical structure below the plane of the Milky Way. that occupies a significant part of the southern sky.
A similar structure in the northern sky, called the north polar spur, has been known since the early days of radio astronomy and X-ray astronomy. For many years it was believed to have arisen as a result of a supernova explosion near the Sun tens ago or hundreds of thousands of years. However, on the whole, the north and south structures of the map resemble an hourglass shaped halo, quite symmetrical with respect to the center of the galaxy, which is 25,000 light years from the Sun.
“With its high sensitivity, good spectral and angular resolution and low background, the eROSITA telescope (one of two instruments aboard Russia’s Spektr-RG orbital observatory), which scans the entire sky every six months, has become a unique tool for detecting and studying objects that are much larger than the telescope’s field of view and make up a significant portion of the entire sky, “he explains it’s a statement Roscosmos Michael Freiberg, a scientist working with data from the eROSITA telescope at the Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics at the Max Planck Society in Germany.
The hot gas structures on either side of the galactic disk, clearly visible in this all-sky X-ray study, arose, most likely, due to shock waves. caused by a powerful burst of activity in the center of our galaxy tens of millions of years ago.
Large-scale X-rays observed in the range of 0.6 to 1.0 kiloelectronvolts show the manifestation of these giant bubbles with slowly varying brightness over a large part of the sky. Its angular dimensions are comparable to the dimensions of our entire Milky Way, which corresponds to linear dimensions of ten kiloparsecs, that is, up to 30,000 light years in diameter.
The “eROSITE Bubbles” have a striking morphological similarity to the well-known “Fermi Bubbles”, but they do not coincide geometrically with them, and the size of the latter is notably smaller. The “Fermi Bubbles” were discovered years ago by the Fermi Observatory with much higher photon energies (gamma rays), one million times more energetic than X-ray photons recorded by the Russian Spektr-RG Observatory.
–
