Bubbles of radiation billowing from the galactic center may have started as a stream of positrons.
A jet of high-energy electrons and positrons,, could explain the bubbles’ multi-wavelength light, physicist Ilias Cholis reported April 18 at the American Physical Society meeting.
In the initial burst, most of the particles would have been launched along jets aimed perpendicular to the galaxy’s disk. As the particles interacted with other galactic matter, they would lose energy and cause the emission of different wavelengths of light. Those jets would have been aimed away from Earth, so those particles can never be detected. But some of the particles could have escaped along the galactic disk, perpendicular to the bubbles, and end up passing Earth. “It could be that just now, some of those positrons are hitting us,” says Cholis, of Oakland University in Rochester, Mich.
So Cholis and Iason Krommydas of Rice University in Houston analyzed positrons detected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station. The pair found an excess of positrons whose present-day energies could correspond to a burst of activity from the galactic center between 3 million and 10 million years ago, right around when the Fermi bubbles are thought to have formed, Cholis said at the meeting.
The result, Cholis said, supports the idea that the Fermi bubbles came from a time when the galaxy’s central black hole was busier than it is today.
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