John Matson (Scientific American, Nov. 15, 2010)
An analysis of public data from a NASA satellite turns up massive galactic structures. Artist's conception showing the approximate scale of the newfound Fermi bubbles above and below the Milky Way (NASA/GSFC).
A group of astrophysicists has located two massive bubbles of plasma, each extending tens of thousands of light-years, emitting high-energy radiation above and below the plane of the galaxy. The researchers found the structures in publicly released data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, which was launched in 2008 to investigate sources of extremely energetic photons — namely, gamma rays, which have higher frequencies than x-rays.
From its orbital perch hundreds of kilometers above Earth's surface, Fermi has charted the location of gamma-ray sources with its Large Area Telescope (LAT). But just where the gamma rays originate is not always clear; the foreground of Fermi's view is clouded with emission from events such as cosmic rays striking dust in the Milky Way's disk. To get a better picture of the gamma-ray environment, Douglas Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues carefully subtracted those sources based on maps showing locations of cosmic dust, models of the galactic disk, and known emitters of gamma rays, such as active black holes in other galaxies. More>>
[And the ancient Indians knew what they knew about the universe, math, and architecture because visitors from space told them. The Vedas are a detailed record of that knowledge, particularly the Vimana Shastra. Here Vishnu is seen in space, where the bubbles seem to represent entire cosmos.]
With a technique called optogenetics, researchers can probe how the nervous system works in unprecedented detail. Their findings could lead to better treatments for psychiatric problems.
