Added 1 new A* page:Well I'm going to do some science bloggertry today rather than another Lance Murdoch, Unqualified Psychoanalyst comic, because it's late, and it's the weekend, darn it. Although I will be doing my weekend comic, The Princess and the Giant, this Sunday, and oh gosh look here's a teaser/link to last week's page just in case you missed it:
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Oh yeah, part of the reason it's so late as I write this is because today's A* page was a fussy one. For instance, here are various attempts at layouts/finishes for just this page:
And that's not even taking my various shading attempts into account! Dar!
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When I was looking up the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope the other day--that's the orbiting instrument that made that all-sky map of various pulsars--I came across something somewhat mind-blowing AND directly A*-related! It seems that a year or so ago, some folks at NASA or wherever were taking that sky map of gamma ray emissions and basically Photoshopping it in various ways to see if they could find interesting structures or patterns that weren't immediately obvious, and they came up with this:
image by NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT/D. Finkbeiner et al. (source)
in which, you'll notice, two gigantic, bulbous gamma-ray emitting lobes appear above and below the galactic center. Extrapolating from that data, what they came up with was this (artist's interpretation):
image by NASA (source)
They call them Fermi bubbles, and they are areas 25,000 light years tall (that's the same distance from Earth to A* at the galactic center, by the way!), radiating out in elongated spherical shapes from approximately the top and bottom of supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way. The gamma rays they're emitting come from collisions of highly energetic electrons with low-energy photons (radio and infrared light).
They don't know what generated these structures, but it seems likely to have had something to do with A*--possibly from huge jets of energy thrown out from the poles of the supermassive black hole millions of years ago, when it was feeding on a lot of material swirling into the center of the galaxy. And the curving shapes of the lobes make me wonder if those particles are still trapped in magnetic field lines anchored on the black hole.
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