Posted on 01/14/2006 10:44:05 AM PST by Hadean
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12, 2006 (UPI) -- U.S. astronomers say they have discovered a giant Milky Way-sized tunnel filled with high energy particles in a distant galaxy cluster.
The findings, presented to the American Astronomical Society meeting may provide the missing evolutionary link necessary to understand radio jets resulting from supermassive black holes within giant galaxies, researchers said.
Scientists working with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the multi-million-degree gas in the galaxy cluster Abell 2597, where they discovered an unusual X-ray tunnel large enough to fit the entire Milky Way galaxy inside.
The cluster, located at a distance of roughly 1 billion light-years, contains a tunnel in the hot gas, which measures nearly 110 thousand light-years by 36 thousand light-years in size. The tunnel, which appears to originate near the core of the central giant galaxy in the cluster, may be more than 200 million years old, researchers said.
you beat me to it...
hopefully it won't be used to flood our local solar system with a
bunch of refugee telephone sanitizers.
Then how do you explain the toll booth at the entrance?
That's a great idea! I'm also reminded of Gregory Benford's Galactic Center series, which are set in such an environment. As a physicist, Benford has spent much of his career studying such jets, and duplicating their effects in the laboratory. I wonder if studying of the particles in this natural environment will help lead to new methods of accelerator design and experiments here on Earth.
Wouldn't it be funny if it were the Robert KKK Byrd Inter-Galactic Tunnel?
If there are creatures stomping around the universe who are capable of constructing a tunnel 600 quadrillion miles long, I hope they're friendly. At any rate, they probably are not interested in the outcome of the Seahawks/Redskins game.
If you feed it matter, it will convert something like 40% of that matter to pure energy. And shoot some of it out of the poles of the rotation of the infalling matter, at relativistic speeds. "Cap" one pole, in the sense of feeding interposing matter preferentially in front of one lobe of the jet, returning the energy so captured to the galaxy's matter circulation, and eventually back to the hole feed.
Then net recoil from the escape of the other lobe will move your galaxy. Presto, it's a spaceship. The whole civilization moves.
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