earthling @appassionato@mastodon.social
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Milky Way Easter Eggs

This artist’s concept visualizes gamma-ray bubbles discovered by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. From end to end, the bubbles extend 50,000 light-years, or roughly half of the Milky Way’s diameter. Hints of the bubbles’ edges were first observed in X-rays (blue) by ROSAT, a Germany-led mission operating in the 1990s. The gamma rays mapped by Fermi (magenta) extend much farther from the galaxy’s plane.




Image Description On a black backdrop speckled with tiny stars, large magenta lobes shaped like a giant vertical figure eight extend outward from a thin glowing disk seen edge-on. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
earthling @appassionato@mastodon.social
Public

We got a halo

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy’s dark matter halo.

An even larger halo of dark matter (about a million light-years across) cocoons the stellar halo. This mystery material has mass, so its gravity pulls on things we can see. But it isn’t visible itself, and no one knows exactly what it’s made of. This strange stuff makes up about 90 percent of our galaxy’s mass.




Image Description This animation labeled Dark Matter Halo begins with a very zoomed out, face-on view of a galaxy with spiral arms wrapped counterclockwise around a bright yellow center. The view shifts until we see the galaxy edge-on, now thin with a small spherical center. The galaxy is encased in a large, mottled purple sphere that turns as the galaxy moves. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre.
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