Fermi bubbles defy explanation, Despite extensive analysis

This artist's representation shows the Fermi bubbles towering above and below the galaxy. 

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Scientists from Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have analyzed more than four years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, along with data from other experiments, to create the most detailed portrait yet of two towering bubbles that stretch tens of thousands of light-years above and below our galaxy.

The bubbles, which shine most brightly in energetic gamma rays, were discovered almost four years ago by a team of Harvard astrophysicists led by Douglas Finkbeiner who combed through data from Fermi's main instrument, the Large Area Telescope (FGST).

The new portrait, described in a paper that has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, reveals several puzzling features, said Dmitry Malyshev, a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology who co-led on the analysis.

For example, the outlines of the bubbles are quite sharp, and the bubbles themselves glow in nearly uniform gamma rays over their colossal surfaces, like two 30,000-light-year-tall incandescent bulbs screwed into the center of the galaxy.

Their size is another puzzle. The farthest reaches of the Fermi bubbles boast some of the highest energy gamma rays, but there's no discernible cause for them that far from the galaxy.

Finally, although the parts of the bubbles closest to the galactic plane shine in microwaves as well as gamma rays, about two-thirds of the way out the microwaves fade and only gamma rays are detectable.

Not only is this different from other galactic bubbles, but it makes the researchers' work that much more challenging, said Malyshev's co-lead, KIPAC postdoctoral researcher Anna Franckowiak.

"Since the Fermi bubbles have no known counterparts in other wavelengths in areas high above the galactic plane, all we have to go on for clues are the gamma rays themselves," she said.

What Made The Bubbles?
Soon after the initial discovery theorists jumped in, offering several explanations for the bubbles' origins.

For example, they could have been created by huge jets of accelerated matter blasting out from the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Or they could have been formed by a population of giant stars, born from the plentiful gas surrounding the black hole, all exploding as supernovae at roughly the same time.

"There are several models that explain them, but none of the models is perfect," Malyshev said. "The bubbles are rather mysterious."

Creating the portrait wasn't easy.

"It's very tricky to model," said Franckowiak. "We had to remove all the foreground gamma-ray emissions from the data before we could clearly see the bubbles."

From the vantage point of most Earth-bound telescopes, all but the highest-energy gamma rays are completely screened out by our atmosphere.

It wasn't until the era of orbiting gamma-ray observatories like Fermi that scientists discovered how common extra-terrestrial gamma rays really are.

Pulsars, supermassive black holes in other galaxies and supernovae are all gamma rays point sources, like distant stars are point sources of visible light, and all those gamma rays had to be scrubbed from the Fermi data.

Hardest to remove were the galactic diffuse emissions, a gamma ray fog that fills the galaxy from cosmic rays interacting with interstellar particles.

"Subtracting all those contributions didn't subtract the bubbles," Franckowiak said. "The bubbles do exist and their properties are robust."

In other words, the bubbles don't disappear when other gamma-ray sources are pulled out of the Fermi data, in fact, they stand out quite clearly.

Franckowiak says more data is necessary before they can narrow down the origin of the bubbles any further.

"What would be very interesting would be to get a better view of them closer to the galactic center," she said, "but the galactic gamma ray emissions are so bright we'd need to get a lot better at being able to subtract them."

Fermi is continuing to gather the data Franckowiak wants, but for now, both researchers said, there are a lot of open questions.

Dark Matter: Cosmologists weigh cosmic filaments and voids

A zoomed-out view of galaxies identified by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. 

Filaments and voids are visible at this scale.

Cosmologists have established that much of the stuff of the universe is made of dark matter, a mysterious, invisible substance that can't be directly detected but which exerts a gravitational pull on surrounding objects.

Dark matter is thought to exist in a vast network of filaments throughout the universe, pulling luminous galaxies into an interconnected web of clusters, interspersed with seemingly empty voids.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have measured the "weight" of these cosmic voids and filaments for the first time, showing the former are not as empty as they look.

The studies of voids and filaments are currently available on the ArXiv (arXiv:1402.3302) and were conducted by graduate student Joseph Clampitt and professor Bhuvnesh Jain of the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences.

Gravitational lensing, the tiny distortions of distant galaxy images due to intervening matter, allows scientists to weigh galaxies by measuring how much their light bends.

Voids, on the other hand, are enormous, seemingly empty spaces in the universe with scarcely any galaxies visible — an arrangement that makes measuring their contents through lensing more difficult.

While galaxies and filaments have more mass than the average regions of the universe, voids have less mass than average.

This unbalanced distribution causes matter to rapidly move away from voids and towards the concentrations of mass along the cosmic filaments that lie between them.

A depiction of filaments and voids from The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics’ Millennium Simulation Project.

"This means that voids act like objects with an effectively negative mass," Clampitt said, "such that even light rays bend away from them. They act roughly like concave lenses, the opposite of big galaxies, which act like convex lenses."

Clampitt and Jain detected the tiny distortions produced by voids on the images of nearly 40 million galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

This breakthrough came just a few months after they, along with Masahiro Takada of Tokyo University's Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, detected the lensing signal from the dark matter filaments that connect galaxies.

"The measurements came as a wonderful surprise," Jain said. "Theoretical studies had predicted that we'd have to wait for much bigger surveys well into the future to detect void lensing. Joseph's ingenious analysis techniques extracted a subtle signal no one had seen before."

Their results show that voids are not as empty as they appear. Dark matter and other dim structures permeate all the way to the center of the voids.

"Although the density of this matter is far less than average," Clampitt said, "it is somewhat surprising that the voids are not as empty as the galaxy distribution suggests."

"The density at the center of a typical void," Jain said, "is about half the mean density in the universe, but that still leaves the voids with an enormous deficit in mass, about a thousand trillion times the mass of the sun."