Outflows of galaxy centre detected

The outflows of charged particles from the centre of Galaxy, stretching more than halfway across the sky, have been detected and mapped by Australian astronomers, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization ( CSIRO) said in a statement Thursday. The outflows were detected by astronomers from Australia, the United States, Italy and The Netherlands. They report their finding in Thursday issue of Nature. The outflows correspond to a "haze" of microwave emission previously spotted by the WMAP and Planck space telescopes of Europe and regions of gamma-ray emission detected with NASA's Fermi space telescope in 2010, which were dubbed the "Fermi Bubbles". The WMAP, Planck and Fermi observations did not provide enough evidence to indicate definitively the source of the radiation they detected, but CSIRO's 64-m Parkes radio telescope do. The outflows pose no danger to earth or the solar system. " These outflows contain an extraordinary amount of energy -- about a million times the energy of an exploding star," said the research team's leader, CSIRO's Dr Ettore Carretti. In fact, the outflows appear to have been driven by many generations of stars forming and exploding in the Galactic Centre over the last hundred million years. The new observations also help answer one of astronomers' big questions about our Galaxy: how it generates and maintains its magnetic field.