This Is Cool

From NYT:

Something big is going on at the center of the galaxy, and astronomers are happy to say they don’t know what it is.

A group of scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope said Tuesday that they had discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The bubbles, they said at a news conference and in a paper to be published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal, extend 25,000 light years up and down from each side of the galaxy and contain the energy equivalent to 100,000 supernova explosions.

And this is what it looks like:

From end to end, the newly discovered gamma-ray bubbles extend 50,000 light-years, or about half of the Milky Way’s diameter, as shown in this illustration.

By DENNIS OVERBYE