Giant Bubbles Found in Space

http://news.discovery.com/space/gamma-ray-bubbles-black-hole.html

Giant Bubbles Found in Space
An ancient eruption of a supermassive black hole may have inflated the mysteriously huge bubbles that span 50,000 light-years.
Irene Klotz
Wed Nov 10, 2010
THE GIST
Astronomers discover new type of object -- huge bubbles of gamma rays stemming from the heart of the galaxy.
The two bubbles could have been inflated by a past eruption from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
The bubbles span 50,000 light-years across the sky.

An ancient eruption of a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way may have inflated two huge bubbles of gamma rays which were just now discovered and are considered a new type of astronomical object.

"It shows, once again, that the universe is full of surprises," said Jon Morse, director of astrophysics at NASA headquarters.

Combined, the bubbles, which are aligned at the center of the Milky Way, span a vast distance of about 50,000 light-years. The structures are very distinct, with defined edges, and have as much energy in them as 100,000 supernova.

They were found with NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope, which surveys the sky every three hours for the highest-energy light.

Among the 1,500 sources of gamma rays Fermi has mapped so far, nothing resembles the bubble-shaped structures, which stretch across more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus.

"You have to ask where could energy like that come from," said astronomer Doug Finkbeiner, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Hints of the bubbles appeared years earlier in X-ray surveys and in maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation stemming from the Big Bang explosion.

"We had a hypothesis before Fermi launched that there should be some gamma ray emission in this part of the sky. We were thinking something a bit more modest, maybe something within 10 or 20 or 30 degrees of the center, not these giant structures reaching all the way up to 50 degrees," Finkbeiner said.

Scientists have two possible explanations for the Fermi bubbles. Theory one: a burst of star-formation at the center of the galaxy generated short-lived massive stars with energetic winds that blasted high-energy particles out into space.

Finkbeiner points out that it would take some time to accumulate as much energy as what's inside the bubbles, however. He favors an alternative theory: an outburst from the supermassive black hole lurking in the center of the galaxy.

In other galaxies, astronomers have seen evidence for jets of particles triggered by matter that is being pulled into a black hole, objects that have so much gravitational pull that not even light can escape their grasp.

There's no evidence that the Milky Way's central black hole, which is about 400 million times more massive than our sun, has jets, but astronomers suspect it might have in the past.

"We know it didn't get to be that big by sitting there quietly all the time. It certainly has had big accretion events in the past, where material falls on it and then some of that material comes back out as high-energy particles blasted out in the form of a jet," Finkbeiner said.

"We've never really seen very good evidence of it. This might be the first evidence for a major outburst of the black hole at the center of the galaxy. When it's going full-blast … it would not actually take an enormous amount of time -- maybe 10,000 or 100,000 years -- for it to produce enough energy to create these structures," Finkbeiner said.

"This result is very exciting," added Fermi scientist Simona Murgia, with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif. "These features could reveal unexpected and very important physical processes in our galaxy that until now we knew nothing about despite the fact that these features could possibly be almost as large as the Milky Way and might have been around for millions of years."

The discovery was unveiled during a teleconference with reporters on Tuesday and is the subject of an upcoming paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

A universe could exist 'inside every black hole,' claims scientist

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7918978/A-universe-could-exist-inside-every-black-hole-claims-scientist.html
A universe could exist 'inside every black hole,' claims scientist
A hidden universe could exist inside every black hole, a Polish cosmologist has claimed.
Amy Willis
02 Aug 2010

Using an adaptation of Einstein's general theory of relativity, Nikodem Poplawski, of Indiana University, Bloomington, analysed the theoretical motion of particles entering a black hole.

He concluded that it was possible for a whole new universe to exist inside every black hole, which could mean that our own universe could be inside a black hole as well.

"Maybe the huge black holes at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies are bridges to different universes," he told New Scientist.

Explaining his theory in the journal Physics Letters B, he said he used the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama (ECKS) theory of gravity, in his analysis to account for the angular momentum of particles in a black hole. Doing this it made it possible to calculate a quality of space-time called torsion, a property believed to repel gravity.

He says instead of matter reaching infinite density in a black hole called "singularities" in Einstein's theory of relativity - the behaviour of the space-time acts more like a spring being compressed with matter rebounding and expanding continuously.

Dr Poplawski explains that this "bounce-back" effect is caused by the torsion of space-time having a repulsive force against the gargantuan strength of gravity in a black hole.

Dr Poplawski also claims that this recoiling effect could be what has led to our expanding universe that we observe today and could explain why our universe is flat, homogeneous and isotropic without needing cosmic inflation.

It is hard to see how we could test whether or not Dr Poplawski's theory is correct; the force of gravity in black holes is such that nothing can escape, so no information about what is going on inside one can ever reach us.

However, according to Dr Poplawski, if we were living in a spinning black hole then the spin would transfer to the space-time inside, meaning the universe would have a preferred direction - something we would be able to measure. Such a preferred direction could be related to the observed imbalance of matter and anti-matter in the universe and could explain the oscillation of neutrinos.