Astronomers using the eROSITA X-ray telescope onboard the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) observatory have detected X-ray-emitting bubbles that extend approximately 14,000 parsecs (45,662 light-years) above and below the central region of our Milky Way Galaxy.
This image from the eROSITA X-ray telescope shows the energetic Universe. Image credit: Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner & the eSASS team / Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics / Eugene Churazov & Marat Gilfanov, IKI.
Launched in July 2019, eROSITA is a large-collecting-area and wide-field-of-view X-ray telescope.
Over the course of six months, from December 2019 to June 2020, it has completed a survey of the whole sky.
A preliminary analysis of the all-sky survey map indicated that more than one million X-ray sources were detected by eROSITA. This is comparable to, and may exceed, the total number of X-ray sources known before this telescope launched.
During the past two years, two strange events have occurred at our Milky Way’s violent center. In October of 2019, Milky Way’s central black hole, SgrA (literally “Sagittarius A-star”) which until May, 2019, when it suddenly brightened, appeared like a massive, dormant volcano, a sleeping monster, a slumbering region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that “what goes into them does not come out”. A “one-way door out of our universe,” said Event Horizon Telescope director and astronomer Shep Doeleman of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics about discoveries of the enigmatic objects stranger than science fiction that led to three 2020 Noble Prize awards in physics.
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