Discovery of huge ‘barrier’ by astronomers that divides the Milky Way center fro

Posted by Kapil on November 26th, 2021

According to a new study, the Milky Way’s center may be considerably stranger than astronomers assumed.

A team of experts from Nanjing’s Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed a map of radioactive gamma-rays for the study. They identified the universe’s highest-energy type of light, which can occur when extremely high-speed particles collide. They’re called cosmic rays because they collide with ordinary stuff exploding in and around our galaxy’s core.

The effect is defined as an unseen “barrier” that wraps around the galactic center, according to the researchers. It keeps the density of cosmic rays there much lower than the rest of the galaxy’s baseline level.

What does the new study reveal?

In the constellation Sagittarius, around 26,000 light-years from Earth, lies the galaxy’s center. It’s a dense and dusty environment, with more than a million times the number of stars per light-year as the entire solar system, all encircled by a supermassive black hole with a mass of around 4 million times that of the sun.

The researchers matched the density of cosmic rays in this sea to the density of cosmic rays in the galactic center in their latest study. Cosmic rays can’t be seen directly, but they can be found in gamma-ray space maps, which show where cosmic rays have impacted other types of matter.