A giant hourglass of hot gas, whose bubbles extend up to 50,000 light years, is crossing the Milky Way.
Described in the journal Nature, it was immortalized during its first full scan of the sky by the eRosita X-ray telescope, aboard the German Russian space mission 'Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma' (Sgr), launched in July 2019.
The eRosita telescope made a deep scan of the sky in less than six months.
The authors of the study, including Italian researchers from the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), describe "an enormous gaseous structure in the shape of an hourglass, whose lobes branch off from the center of the Milky Way, above and beyond below the plane of the galactic disk ”.
According to experts, "the endless bubbles of eRosita would be shock waves generated by the energetic activity passed in the center of our galaxy".
The energy needed to fuel the formation of these structures may have been triggered in the past by the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way, a monster with a mass approximately four million times that of the Sun. The discovery of the eRosita bubbles, they conclude. experts, it is an important step towards understanding the cosmic cycle of matter in and around the Milky Way and other galaxies.
