Space can surprise even those who spend their lives studying it. People often think of our solar system as just a few planets and a bunch of empty space.
After years of careful mapping, a new analysis reveals what appears to be a channel of hot, low-density plasma stretching out from our solar system toward distant constellations.
Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute recently confirmed it using data from the eRosita instrument . Dr. L. L. Sala, lead researcher, and colleagues shared these findings in a paper published in the journal Astronomy ⁘ Astrophysics .
For a long time, scientists have known that our solar system sits within a peculiar region of space called the Local Hot Bubble .
This area, estimated to be about 300 light years across , formed as a result of powerful stellar explosions called supernovas.
They heated the surrounding gas, producing a low-density, high-temperature environment. Traces of these distant events still linger as wispy distributions of hot plasma.
"We find the temperature of the LHB exhibits a north-south dichotomy at high latitudes," stated Dr. L. L. Sala, lead author of the study.
To better understand this environment, scientists turned to eRosita. This X-ray observatory, launched as part of the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma mission , scoured the sky to capture soft X-ray emissions.
One of eRosita's goals is to chart hot gas in space, learn about supernova remnants, and investigate the surroundings of our neighborhood .
By combining these results with older data from ROSAT , another X-ray survey, astronomers have pieced together a more detailed picture of our local region.
They took on the challenging task of dividing the sky into thousands of bins, extracting subtle signals of warm gas, dust cavities , and interstellar structures. This painstaking approach helped isolate the faint glow of the surrounding plasma.
What stands out is the detection of a channel, or "tunnel," that appears to stretch toward the Centaurus constellation.
No comments:
Post a Comment