Nearly 1k mysterious strands revealed in Milky Way’s center
news.northwestern.edu
news.northwestern.edu
https://www.flickr.com/photos/geckzilla/51854563587/
and the deep link (9144 x 5964, but no annotations) for people who have trouble with flickr's UI:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51854563587_4446b5cd40_o...
I’ll have to get on my desktop because that site is hilariously useless on my mobile.
Prettier X-ray and radio pictures, and animations : https://www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/mouse/index.html
A recent summary: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018ApJ...861....5K/abstra... ("famous for its spectacular tail"). There is a link to the arxiv preprint below the abstract.
Lots and lots of additional papers about The Mouse, with its conspicuously long tail, PWN G359.23-0.82, driven by its Vela-like pulsar J1747-2958.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Heartbeat-of-the-Mouse...
I see about 600x400 pixels of that photo.
What a wonderful Internet we’ve made for ourselves.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51847931721_c3feebd201_o...
I mean the first internet-connected computers like the imac g3 had only 32 MB of memory.
I just don't understand the underlying motivation to lock things down like that. It like a cortisol fountain and I get wholly irrationally unreasonably mad. It's actually funny in retrospect.
– request desktop view
– in the bottom right push the down arrow and select original
- a PNG file will download that you can open and save
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules%E2%80%93Corona_Boreal...
This one measures 10 billion light years. Now recall that 1 light year is about 10 trillion kilometers... tick, tick, tick, boom! Mind blown again.
See this excellent video on the scale of the cosmos: https://youtu.be/4iC9Qi3y9q8
And this one on how the universe would meet its fate at the hands of Dark Energy: https://youtu.be/fdFf5PRPE9g
This one on the emptiness of the universe is quite fascinating as well: https://youtu.be/BCjWmfWq0pU
Basically suggesting that if our universe was a human life, we'd still be in the hospital right after birth. So much time left to go.
Just watched the first one and it was great.
Looking forward to the rest.
Nature: https://youtu.be/rENyyRwxpHo
Contributing Author: https://youtu.be/Ayj4p3WFxGk
> Filaments within clusters are separated from one another at perfectly equal distances — about the distance from Earth to the sun.
Does that mean that they are able to distinguish individual filaments that are "only" 1 AU apart, but ~ 25 000 light years (~1 600 000 000 AU) away from us? Because that would also be damn impressive!
Paper is here - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10541.pdf
(Edit:Yes take a look at the images and scale bars on page 14)
Yup - definitely related to warp drive tech ;)
The strands from the article are 150 light years which is seventy eight million, eight hundred and ninety four thousand light minutes (78894000lm) or nine million, eight hundred and sixty one thousand, seven hundred and fifty times the distance of the sun (9861750x) which gives us 16mx9861750 or one hundred and fifty seven thousand, seven hundred and eighty eight km (157788km). About 40% of the way to the (real) moon.
If you mean the Hercules Great Wall, 10 billion light years is five quadrillion, two hundred and fifty nine trillion, six hundred billion light minutes (5259600000000000lm) which gives us six hundred and fifty seven trillion, four hundred and fifty billion (657450000000000x) times the distance to the sun which would be ten trillion, five hundred and nineteen billion, two hundred and million km (10519200000000km). Or "quite big".
One million, when not attached to something tangible, cannot be processed. A house is one million euros - that I can get. What is one million protons side to side - I have no idea.
Of course, I can calculate that 10^6x10^-15 m is 10^-9 m. Right..
Same goes for scale. If I say - twice the width of a tree you immediately get an idea. Twide the width of a hair - not much. A million times the width of a hair - neither.
So 10^9x10^12x10^3 m = 10^24m, looks it is a lot.
Do you know how large 50000 bacteria side to side are? I don't. I can compute the number but these are neither scales nor magnitudes I am used to.
300,000 km seems to be large but I do not know how much. About 10 times the perimeter of our planet. But this does not say much either.
But when you say "five people in a room, and then two joined" you have no problems processing the numbers.
We witness structure in a 3d space, have to add time to that dimension and yet look onto something back in time, when commonly agreed fixtures like the fine structure constant might have had a different value or not exist at all.
Without too many spoilers, the coarse structure of the universe is imagined to be able to be manipulated into tools and weapons.
1,000,000,000,000
x 10,000,000,000
-----------------------
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Or
10 ** 22
Aka Ten Sextillion
It's interesting when the question of what is driving electrons across these filaments at near-light speed is still open... could they be natural accelerators? What if you could ride one of these filaments?
Or what if they're like the exhaust trails of an FTL vehicle/body? Or something inter-dimensional?
Knowing they're very far away, are we looking for them closer to home? Can they even be observed with such clarity if they were closer to us?
Black hole accretion disks are my bet. Accretion disks are the most hot and violent places we know of. The more powerful the plasma dynamo, the larger the magnetic field lines will be. Think Van Allen belts but galactic scale.
Electrons move freely along magnetic field lines and they are very lightweight. Moving at near light speed along them isn't a unique phenomenon. Hell, every TV on the planet until 20 years ago used to make an electron beam.
But it would fit so well, because those wobbly curves almost scream "vortex" to my eyes. Interplay between forces towards some sink/collector and repulsive forces amongst the attracted, doesn't this almost always end up looking like that? If a mathematical pattern can be found across a range as wide as bathtub sinks and tornadoes, perhaps we should not be surprised to find it on galactic scale as well. But the dimensions involved, the fact that this whole thing apparently emits sufficient waves/particles for us to detect, crazy!
One could imagine black holes forming far out in the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole, with the matter already organized by the central mass. That would seem to demand a collection of coplanar accretion discs around the baby holes (which could themselves be quite large), and the holes themselves in that plane. (But we still need to explain their regular spacing.)
Maybe that would also help explain how the "impossible"-mass holes seen by LIGO form?
Not only that but they're also huge. If we were inside one we may see them as some sort of an almost uniform, isotropic field ... perhaps like cosmic background radiation?
That would be rather depressing, if true. There's only a couple strands, so it would seem that FTL travel is very very rare. Among the 100 billion stars in our galaxy, only a handful have used FTL travel in the last 25,000 years?
One single evidence of physics breaking aliens would be the most cheerful thing in my lifetime.
Maybe the costs are *ahem* astronomical, so the tech is reserved for very large ships, only needing or affording a few trips. You know, like our one ever visit to the Moon.
Maybe they’re the tubes connecting gates or wormholes carrying a regular traffic of thousands of ships.
You know this is not factually true, even if you just consider the Apollo project.
Thank you for saying it. I desperately want this to be the case.
The balloon structures are civilizations with the ability to move at least throughout their local group, the strands are results of experimentation for whatever technology allows them to do so. :)
Just like you can have all kinds of optical aberrations, does the same go for radio based observations?
For instance, isn't it odd that most of them happen to lie in the vertical direction of this particular observatory across many lightyears of distance?
However, in this case the brighter filaments have been observed for decades, the wide angle view of this image is from 1989 from the VLA array in New Mexico with some data augmentation from Spitzer space telescope.
https://public.nrao.edu/gallery/the-center-of-our-galaxy-2/
The MeerKAT study just increases the resolution and signal to noise ratio, which has allowed us to see many more of them, but we can see the 'old' ones as well. The emission phenomena is pretty well understood AFAIK, the mystery just being mostly when/why/how they got there.
The other thing to keep in mind is that these filaments are huge in the night sky. The image we see is a mosaic of many observations that spans 3.5 x 2.5 degrees. The moon is ~.5 degrees, or about the same size as that giant bubble on the lower right.
Here's the paper. I just scanned through it and its relatively approachable - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10541.pdf
Edit: Check out the section 'OBSERVATIONS AND DATA PROCESSING'
It's not that I doubt that astrophysicists take this into account, I'm sure they do! But when we see an "image of a black hole", that's really a gazillion data points from a multitude of different observatories, processed by human made algorithms with human made models and biases, and it happens to look just like we expected - how do we know it's not just our assumptions that made it into the processing and modelling?
Again, I'm sure every astrophysicist ever has thought about this and knows how it's handled, so it's not a criticism. I'd just love to read more about it, as a layperson :)
Or at least the ones we see. How would they look like if viewed from above?
Indeed, our own solar system is not aligned with galactic north-south,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motion_of_Sun,_Earth...
and that is hardly unusual or unexpected:
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/159-our-solar-syst...
And while we don't have many galactic black hole candidates, the ones we have and can see beaming are haphazardly oriented, and there's no reason why black holes should behave differently from their progenitor stars (oriented haphazardly) or other compact objects (the pulsars mentioned above).
What a few puffs of dust that have not reached an energy minimum yet do isn't important.
There is further detail from Ethan Siegel here: https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-37-the-earth...
Quoting a tiny fraction that article:
The Sun appears to move *up-and-down* and in-and-out with respect to the rest of the galaxy as it revolves around the Milky Way.
Additionally, amplifying my previous comment, almost no known black hole candidates' equators are aligned with their host galaxies' thin discs, at any redshift.
>The Sun is presently located about 25-to-27,000 light years from the galactic center, and makes the shape of a simple ellipse around the galaxy.
Nobody has ever addressed my question about how the braiding you’d expect to form in a quasar would unwind — and if it doesn’t, we should expect to find most structures along “cooled, inflated” braiding. Which we seem to.
> Explained in a colloquial manner, the extended objects (loop, string, or membrane, etc.) can be potentially anyonic in 3+1 and higher spacetime dimensions in the long-range entangled systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyon
In particular, the “loops” would be magnetic field lines from the singularity to the disc (and back), which would become tangled via swirls within the disc as it spiraled inwards. While each piece would be small, the total braid would be quite large — due to number of particles and chaotic nature of the disc.
I know a single anyon doesn’t weigh much - but is there an estimate of “anyonic mass” to the galaxy, stores as tangles?
Ok, I will try. I have to admit I do not fully understand what you are asking.
As noted in the link at the top, it is reasonable to speculate that these filaments are related to the activity of the galactic centre supermassive black hole. However, we do not have a quasar in our galaxy, and it is hard to imagine (consistent with evidence from this and similar galaxies at various cosmological redshifts) that the Milky Way possessed an active galactic centre which subsequently was quenched. Indeed, part of the mystery here is that there is a quite weak magnetic field permeating the galactic centre, and little outward cosmic ray pressure.
The spectral index (more details at https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10552 §3.1, "nonthermal radio filaments that have broad spectral index distribution as well as the steepest spectral index that can readily be discerned at high latitudes", cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_index although neither link is especially friendly to non-experts) is entirely consistent with synchrotron radiation, which does not require any exotic particles at the filamentary sources of the radio emissions. As discussed in §3.2 of the arxiv preprint, all we need is highly accelerated electrons. The mechanism for accelerating the electrons is unknown, but there are several explanations available that do not require exotic particles. §4.3 discusses several plausible alternatives.
I'm no expert on anyons but I do know how Wilczek described them when he first proposed them, and Keilmann's observations of his humour, and I struggle to see what problems introducing anyons might reasonably solve at these bulk scales. Additionally, I do not see how anyonic behaviour -- rather than straightforward magnetobremsstrahlung -- could be relevant, much less a better description, at the warm temperatures in the environments of these filaments and galactic centre molecular clouds.
Unfortunately, I don't understand your second last paragraph at all.
I would say that galactic anyons solve a problem:
The toroidal knotting you’d expect around some kind of active black hole would produce effects we see, and connects them via the same mechanism —
1. Why galaxies have weird filament structures everywhere — gas is settling into loop excitations around the black hole;
2. Which is also why the galaxy seems unusually bound, because pulling it apart places additional strain in many, many anyons we can’t see or readily interact with (due to scale);
3. While also explaining the same features at a higher scale, eg galactic clusters or why so many things like Great Attractor look like the intersection of a toroidal knot.
My last paragraph is that it’s my understanding some tiny amount of energy goes into being the anyon, and hence it has mass. So the “braiding” of any system would contribute a (small?) mass to it — and I wanted to see the calculation.
I assume I’m off on a wild chase, but I want to see where the math fails for my own education.
> [the] Great Attractor look[s] like the intersection of a toroidal knot
What? Please explain.
> the galaxy seems unusually bound
Discovered features of our galaxy is about the best evidence for Copernicanism that we have. Up to the limit of current observation, there is nothing at all physically special about the Milky Way for any practical purposes.
We would therefore expect to find filamentary structures in other spiral galaxies in our sky, and be surprised (which is great for theorists) if they were not there when we look.
What do you mean by pulling our galaxy apart? What's the mechanism?
Here is where you should write down the maths you are hoping someone will check, and here is where you get to satisfy your complaint that nobody has ever answered you seriously before.
In particular, and please forgive me that I can't think of a politer way of putting it, I think you need to demonstrate that you have any idea at all about what you are talking about in your numbered paragraphs in this reply-comment's parent.
> ... "braiding" of any system would contribute a (small?) mass to it -- and I wanted to see the calculation
My best guess is that you are thinking that the (far from active) black hole in the central parsec of our galaxy is somehow lifting mass out of itself and into the wider galaxy, and so will briefly discuss that.
A reasonable first step towards the theoretical footing behind that is Murata & Soda 2006, in Phys. Rev. D. https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.74.04..., "Hawking radiation from rotating black holes and gravitational anomalies" (also at https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0606069v2) where the scalar field (also seen in Hawking 1978) is literally a form of "anyon" field. I don't see how the use of the name "anyon" helps, however, and the outward flux is going to be small -- even very very small compared to the ordinary thermal collisions of gas and dust in the galaxy centre, let alone the stars there.
I think that means you're on course for an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics to add in some electromagnetically-non-interacting species that decays at some distance into electromagnetically-interacting ones, along the lines of various dark matter decay models, especially those designed to produce "feedback" in spite of quiet galactic centres. I don't think this is likely to bear fruit, but cf. this blog on DM->tau decay: http://honorsfellows.blogs.wm.edu/2011/06/12/decaying-dark-m...
> I assume I'm off on a wild chase, but I want to see where the math fails for my own education.
I'm afraid I can't join you on your chase, wild or not, but I think that the mathematics of black holes is reasonably accessible and easy enough to find in a variety of textbooks. Coupling an anyon field to it is an exercise in quantum field theory on curved spacetime (as in Murata & Soda) or perhaps a second-quantization of an electrovac solution based on Kerr-Newman. I'm really struggling to see how -- given the high temperatures and high particle numbers involved -- anything is to be gained by looking at the truly microscopic behaviour of the stress-energy tensor, even in the very near region of the horizon. I'm also struggling to see how such effects relating to our central black hole are not totally washed out by processes in the bulge or in the thin disc. Our central black hole is not only far from active, it is also quite small compared to the black holes we find in other galaxies, especially Seyferts and recently discovered high-redshift (z ~ 7.6) QSOs. There is also a lot of dust and gas along our line of sight to the galactic centre, and between these filamentary structures and the galactic centre. (A number of these filaments are much closer to known radio-bright supernova remnants, as detailed in the study, but don't seem very different from those far from known SNRs.) There is also no evidence for beyond-the-standard-model(-of-particle-physics) physics in the discovery of these filaments. I don't mind being asked to think about BTSM, but these filaments are a very poor justification for that.
Finally, the only knotting I expect around a quasar or microquasar are bright spots in the plasma of jets consistent with small-angle radiation, and it's hard to think of a better explanation than proper motion of the source. We see this in stellar-mass X-Ray binaries (especially nearby microquasars), for example. The absence in extragalactic quasars supports this idea, since the proper motion of those sources will necessarily be lower than galactic ones by a couple orders of magnitude.
> I want to see where the math fails for my own education
If you care to write down some math now, I promise to at least have a look at it and see if I can aim you at some additional resources which may be more helpful still.
Those knots are (supermacro) anyons, because they’re tangles in a field that form particle-like excitations, though in this case loop like excitations. And what we’re seeing as weird patterns is gas dancing around those loop excitations within the galaxy, eg emitting synchrotron radiation as they do.
That would be one explanation of why we find so many filaments perpendicular to the galactic plane.
> I'm really struggling to see how -- given the high temperatures and high particle numbers involved -- anything is to be gained by looking at the truly microscopic behaviour of the stress-energy tensor, even in the very near region of the horizon.
For the same reason that braiding tells us something about the behavior of plasma globes — the topology doesn’t just “go away”, and we need to account for where the tangle went. It either fell into the black hole or it’s still here. For the same reason plasma globe filaments only collapse at topological defects.
The precise reason that I think that we can’t ignore the braiding term is that we’re forming an entanglement structure between all of those particles — and while it’s a jumbled mess, that’s precisely why we can’t ignore its contribution to mass and galactic binding.
I also would point out that this doesn’t require any extensions to the standard model — I’m just saying something that happens small also happens big: that braiding is a fact of the wave equation.
There are multiple sources in the galaxy, so on purely a Gauss Law analysis I am pretty sure you are barking up the wrong tree.
Our central black hole is very quiet (as opposed to active), at least a dozen orders of magnitude below the Eddington luminosity in X-rays. Quasars are at (or a very large percentage of) the Eddington luminosity, almost certainly for at least Gyr durations.
The Fermi bubbles are interesting, but around luminous AGNs (at all redshifts) we tend to find extended outflows in ionized ("hibals") and molecular gasses, and afaik we don't see anything like that associated with those gammas. AFAIR there is also a missing ~ 1250 angstrom restframe peak and an associated relativistic wind's redshift (0.1-0.2 c or 30-60 Mm/s) leading to line driving. About a decade ago there was a fair amount of discussion about the Fermi bubbles as evidence of a (not so high) luminosity AGN jet, but it seemed to require contrivances to drop in a sufficiently massive molecular cloud (~ 10^5 solar masses around 10^7 years ago, but don't quote me, not my speciality, and I was already convinced about the present << quasar luminosity (and no trace of tremendous variability or eruptive phase up to considerably more than a few percent of the Eddington luminosity) and by the stellar population).
Most who have found employment actually doing science study the sun, I think. But fusion projects divert many of them.
I'm pretty sure this is a joke, but I could use some reassurance.
described at http://skiesanduniverses.org/Simulations/Uchuu/
That's another kind of superstructure, the dark-matter-guided scaffold of galaxy formation in the observable universe volume.
I suppose this one is from our perspective?
How we know that the arms of the milky way are bent when viewed "from above"? Imagine if they were straight lines when viewed from above. From our perspective, they would appear to be spiraling arms, since the light at the far end of the arm would take longer to reach us.
I'm not doubting astrophysics here, I'm just a layperson that wonders how these things are properly taken into account.
"Stretching up to 150 light-years long, the one-dimensional strands (or filaments) are found in pairs and clusters"
This is surely very interesting and raises lots of lovely questions, found in pairs aspect must be indicative of something. Would love to know if the pair's spacing constant. Also, how can they be one-dimensional as my understanding is, we would not be able to measure them far away if that was the case.
This is probably a stupid question, but how can anything in our three dimensional world truly be two dimensional? How is that imposed on matter or energy?
I thought we used 1/2/3 dimensions to help ourselves understand our world better; like theoretical tools we can use on paper or a computer to simulate and explore reality. But we actually have 2 dimensional objects in the world?
Anyons don’t only exist in lower dimensions: because of how knot theory works, we found the simplest cases in a highly confined electrons — but there’s higher dimensions analogs for higher dimensional knots.
You no longer get anyons from particles exchanging position, but rather, from when fields tangle in 2-knots.
However, the rings in a magnetic field form a torus, so tangles in the magnetic field can (theoretically) knot fairly easily, eg from energies swirls in an accretion disk.
Are they really one-dimensional or is it just relative to their 150 LY length?
Sounds like the wake of shipping lanes, the ships even follow regulations to stay a safe distance away from one another, though they really should do something about those older engines that mess up the landscape for everyone with the wakes. If that's not a sci-fi story yet, it probably should be!
I wonder what those actually are, though.
Whether it's easy to resolve them (or rule them out, if not resolved) in M31 is a good question for radioastronomers.
However, from a broad Copernican Principle perspective, it would be very strange if they were in our galaxy but not M31 or other spiral galaxies.
everything is a matter of point of view and perspective
Whatever fantastical concept we can imagine likely exists in some iteration out there.
That's a hard trick to pull, though. How do you tell an expert's tale without a) getting too technical for most or b) getting to ELI5 for the few?
What a sad bunch of derivative scientific clout chasers.