There is a gamma-ray trickster in the area.
The Fermi bubbles have been associated with energetic radiation coming from a far away place.
The origin of the universe is thought to be millisecond pulsars in a dwarf galaxy.
The discovery has implications for our understanding of the Fermi bubbles, but it could have an impact on other areas of research.
The discovery of the Fermi bubbles was a big surprise. They are enormous bubbles of high-energy gas from the center of the universe that extend above and below the plane of the universe.
The bubbles were created millions of years ago when the black hole in the Milky Way created them. The rest of the disk is not as bright as they are.
Some of the radiation is not evenly distributed. In particular, there is what is described as a " cocoon" of freshly accelerated Cosmic rays in the southern lobe, which was discovered in 2011.
A team of scientists, led by an astronomer from the Australian National University in Australia, has noticed something strange.
The core of Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy, a satellite of the Milky Way that is in the process of being torn apart and subsumed by the larger galaxy, is located near the cocoon.
This would be a very large co-inky-dink with a very low chance of success. It becomes even more intriguing. Both the Sagittarius galaxy and the cocoon have similar shapes.
It's difficult to gauge distance in space. It's not easy to know how far away something is.
It's natural to assume that the two are related if you see something emitting a large amount of radiation. Two things with the same shape and orientations are very strange.
It's not impossible, but there could be a link between those objects.
The researchers decided to revisit the cocoon to see if the dwarf galaxy could possibly be an alternative explanation.
They found that the Sagittarius galaxy was the most likely source of the emission, by modeling the emission over a number of explanations.
What could be making it? Cosmic rays collide with the gas in the interstellar medium to create gamma rays.
This can't be done for the Sagittarius galaxy. The smaller satellite galaxy has been falling into the Milky Way for some time and has been stripped of its gas.
There have been no massive, short-lived stars that have died in spectacular supernovae. There isn't a single one.
The most probable explanation is millisecond pulsars. The collapsed, ultra- dense cores of dead massive stars emit jets of radiation from their poles as they spin.
These would be compatible with the most recent episodes of star formation and have the same distribution as the rest of the stellar population.
The researchers say that it would be possible if the pulsars were 7 to 8 billion years old and low in metal.
Sagittarius might produce more radiation than expected.
One of the things that could confound searches for dark matter signals is the excess ofgamma radiation that is emitted as dark matter particles and antiparticles mutually destroy each other.
The possibility should prompt a closer look at these small, faint galaxies, to see if we need to revise our understanding of dwarf spheroidal galaxies.
The research was published in a journal.
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