The center of the Milky Way is a mysterious place. It is located about 26,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius and is a dense and dusty place , containing more than 1 million times the number of stars per light year as the total photovoltaic system.
A new study exposes that something, a kind of invisible barrier, appears to be accelerating particles to mind-blowing speeds, very close to the speed of light, and creating an abundance of cosmic rays and gamma rays just outside the galactic center (our black hole, Sagittarius A *); But there is also something near the core of the Milky Way that prevents a large part of the cosmic rays from other parts of the universe from entering, protecting us from their aggression.
Something mysterious is blocking cosmic rays
This has been discovered thanks to the fact that a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing has produced a gamma-ray map of the galactic center. The map confirms the previous idea that the black hole that resides at the heart of the Milky Way is accelerating particles to enormous speeds, very close to that of light, creating a large amount of gamma rays right at the edge of the center of the Milky Way, like a sea of cosmic rays . But there is something else. Some kind of structure near the core of the galaxy that prevents cosmic rays from other parts of the universe from entering. Scientists have described it as an “invisible barrier”, which completely envelops the galactic center as if it were a shield.
The source of this phenomenon is harder to pin down, the researchers said, but it could contain the jumble of magnetic fields near our galaxy’s dense core. Again, additional analysis is required to determine precisely what is happening in the strange depths of our galaxy. Fortunately, with each study, we get a little closer to uncovering the mysteries of the most intriguing region of our galaxy.
Referencia: Huang, X., Yuan, Q. & Fan, YZ. A GeV-TeV particle component and the barrier of cosmic-ray sea in the Central Molecular Zone. Nat Commun 12, 6169 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26436-z
