What they have discovered is an “Interstellar tunnel”, this is how researchers describe it that connects our solar system with a distant structure in the direction of the constellation of Centaurus. The discovery was published on October 29 through a statement from the institute. Max Planck of extraterrestrial physics in Germany.
The discovery was possible thanks to the data collected by eROSITA, which although it is a German observatory, its name corresponds to the English acronym for extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array, the point is that approximately 3 million years ago the solar system It is going through a low density environment called a local hot bubble, which is 600 to 1000 light years in diameter, this bubble that we are going through and right now we are more or less in the center.
The thing about 600 to 1000 light years in diameter is that rather than a perfectly spherical bubble, it is more in the shape of a bag of potatoes. This bubble is the product of the explosion of several supernovae that exploded in the last 10 to 20 million years, perhaps This is another of those cases of the incredible strength of the solar system and therefore, of the earth.
The sun, in its journey around the galaxy, takes about 225 million years to complete one revolution or one orbit of the galactic nucleus. This is what is called a galactic year. On that trip we pass through various regions, some quiet and others not so quiet. calm or very dangerous and sometimes we come across stars, it is a quite curious journey.
If the sun had arrived in this local bubble 20 million years earlier than for humans it is an eternity, but for the galactic year the sun's journey would represent only four Galactic weeks, if it had arrived 20 million years earlier the solar system would be In the middle of a cosmic battlefield with supernova explosions, life on Earth would have suffered a lot of damage, surely a mass extinction and of course at that time it would have been our ancestors' turn, the first apes and ancestors of humans.
The local bubble was already known for 50 years, thanks to being able to measure the x-ray background radiation of photons of that type of energy, they are a type of photons at that energy level that cannot travel very far in the medium Interstellar because they end up being absorbed by the cosmic radiation and by the radiation that exists in the Interstellar medium, so this radiation could not come from far away and from this it was deduced that it was a product of the still extremely hot particles of the supernovae, they would be the sparks of the supernovas and those sparks are scattered throughout this bubble we are in.
The team of researchers that is in the news now, what they did was analyze the entire local bubble in detail, they used data from this eRosita Observatory and also from the Rosat, which is a German space observatory that is now no longer in service and from the Analysis they discovered verbatim that there is an “Interstellar tunnel” towards the constellation of Centaurus that creates a gap in the colder Interstellar medium.
This region stands out significantly thanks to the sensitivity that eROSITA has achieved and also to the strategy they have used to explore and analyze The Local Bubble in detail.
The researchers suggest that this tunnel, which they call the centaurus tunnel, may be just a local example of a broader network, distributed throughout the galaxy. This is an old idea. The existence of a network of tunnels throughout the galaxy emerged in 1970, but of course At that time it was difficult to prove, this is not a wormhole like what is shown in the film contact.
If you enter this “tunnel” you do not travel almost instantly to another part of the galaxy, but it has characteristics that make it special, to begin with, it is slightly hotter than the rest of Interstellar space, those particles that are in that tunnel and This bubble, those sparks that are gas molecules are dispersed and that are the product of supernova explosions are extremely hot, they are millions of degrees, each particle is a lot of energy.
Perhaps in the future a propulsion system could be developed that takes advantage of that energy from the tunnel, it would not be a wormhole, but it could be a kind of Galactic hitchhiker towards in this case the constellation of Centaurus.
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