Best printers for Home

Best Mixer Grinder

Best wired Earphones

Best 43 Inch TV in India

Best Wi Fi Routers

Best Home Theatre in India

Smart Watch under 5000

Best Laptops for Education

Best Laptop for Students

<ul><li>Scientists have recorded the <keyword id="8371717" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="biggest-gamma-ray">biggest gamma ray</keyword> burst (GRB) to date in the universe.<br /></li><li>The energy released for greater than what the Sun can generate in its entire 10 billion-year lifespan.<br /></li><li>The explosion occurred 4 billion light years from Earth.<br /></li></ul><br />Four billion light years away from Earth, there was an explosion so big that it generated more energy than the Sun can generate in its entire 10 billion-year lifespan.<br /><br />Gamma rays are some of the most energetic and explosive phenomena in the universe. On 14 January 2019, scientists detected the biggest <keyword id="3533998" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="gamma-ray-burst">gamma ray burst</keyword> (GRB) till date. The outbreak was a billion times brighter than visible light, according to results published in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1743-9">Nature</a>.<br /><br />GRB 190114C was spotted using Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) telescopes on the Canary Islands. <br /><br /><div type="image" title="grb" msid="72222153" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;GRB 190114C as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. The gamma ray burst was centred in the green circle, about 800 light years from the host galaxy’s core.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;"></div>

<br />“Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the universe and typically release more energy in just a few seconds than our Sun during its entire lifetime – they can shine through almost the entire visible universe,” explained David Berge, head of gamma-ray astronomy at <a href="https://www.desy.de/news/news_search/index_eng.html?openDirectAnchor=1735&amp;two_columns=0">DESY</a>.<br /><br /><strong>Looking for explosions<br /></strong><br />Normally, ground telescopes don’t detect GRBs because most of the high energy radiation is absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere. Instead, astronomers watch out for signs on Cherenkov radiation — a blue glow that results from GRBs slamming into other atoms and molecules. <br /><br /><div type="image" title="grbchart" msid="72222165" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Mechanics of a gamma ray burst&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;"></div>

<br />This means that as the GRB hits Earth, the collision can trigger a ‘shower’ of subatomic particles in the planet’s upper atmosphere.<br /><br />But GRBs don’t come with a lot of advance warning and only last a few seconds.<br /><br />The MAGIC telescopes began their observation in record time. It took only 57 seconds from when the GRBs were detected for the telescopes to position themselves and start recording the observations.<br /><br /><strong>The bigger question<br /></strong><br />Even though it’s the first time that such kind of energy has been recorded, scientists still don’t know how such extreme energies are generated.<br /><br /><div type="image" title="grbheader" msid="72222126" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;An artist’s impression of a gamma ray burst triggered by a supernova explosion in which a doomed star’s core collapses to form a black hole. &amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;"></div>
<br />It’s commonly believed that GRBs are a result of massive stars collapsing into themselves to form blackholes. GRBs could also be the result of neutron stars colliding into one another. Basically, any instance where an atomic nuclei is in decay — gamma rays are a by-product.<br /><br />On Earth, gamma rays are emitted during the nuclear fission phase of nuclear explosions.<br /><br />

An explosion 4 billion light years from Earth released more energy than the Sun can generate in its entire lifespan

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Astronomers investigating the wallpaper of our universe stumbled upon a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-fermi-telescope-discovers-unexpected-signal-coming-outside-our-galaxy-2024-1">mysterious signal</a>.</li><li>Something unknown seems to be spewing <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/brightest-gamma-ray-burst-all-time-blinded-scientist-space-equipment-2023-3">high-energy</a> cosmic rays and gamma rays.</li></ul><p>NEW ORLEANS — Astronomers using a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/times-nasa-webb-space-telescope-spotted-something-hubble-missed">NASA space telescope</a> have discovered a region of the sky with a mysterious concentration of some of the universe's highest-energy radiation.</p><p>The astronomers were mapping space's background glow of gamma rays, the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/astronomers-detect-brightest-high-lightgamma-ray-burst-2019-11">brightest and most energetic type of light</a> on the electromagnetic spectrum. They were surprised to find way more gamma rays coming from one part of the sky than anywhere else.</p><p>Alexander Kashlinsky, a cosmologist at the University of Maryland and NASA, called the discovery a "total conundrum" when he presented it at a meeting of the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jupiter-sized-planet-boiled-alive-creating-comet-like-tail-2024-1">American Astronomical Society</a> in New Orleans last Thursday.</p><p>The purple rings in the image below show where they think this signal is coming from. They have 95% confidence that it's somewhere within the outer purple ring. More likely than not, it's somewhere inside the inner purple ring, too. The orange strip across the center of the image is the plane of the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/milky-way-black-hole-spinning-fast-squishing-space-time-2023-11">Milky Way</a>.</p><div type="image" title="illustration of an oval shaped map of space with orange blurry line of the milky way across the middle and a large purple blob in the low right center" height="1500" width="2667" msid="106958291" hostid="261"></div><p>This feature might be connected to a hot spot of ultra-high-energy <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/hidden-corridor-great-pyramid-egypt-giza-cosmic-rays-scientists-2023-3">cosmic rays</a> (UHECRs) coming from a similar direction and with almost exactly the same magnitude. These are the rarest and most energetic of the charged subatomic particles called cosmic rays.</p><p>Unlike gamma rays — which are frequently detected shooting out of black holes and dying or dead stars — the origin of UHECRs is "one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics," NASA explained in a <a target="_blank" href="https://science.nasa.gov/missions/fermi/nasas-fermi-detects-surprise-gamma-ray-feature-beyond-our-galaxy/">statement</a>.</p><p>Because this unexpected gamma-ray feature seems to match a similar feature in UHECRs, it could be a clue in that mystery.</p><p>This discovery deals with some of the most intense radiation in the universe. These gamma rays carry about 1 billion times the energy of visible light. And UHECRs have 1 billion times more energy than gamma rays.</p><div type="image" title="gamma ray burst" height="518" width="1000" msid="106958293" hostid="261"></div><p>Kashlinsky and his colleagues don't know what's causing this super-energetic signal in the universe.</p><p>But he says it's probably coming from some yet-undiscovered phenomenon within 300 million light-years from us.</p><p>"It's a huge area of the sky where exactly what is happening is hard to know," Kashlinsky said.</p><h2>Looking at the wallpaper of the universe</h2><p>Kashlinsky and his colleagues stumbled upon this new mystery when they were analyzing 13 years of data from <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-fermi-gamma-ray-space-telescope-solar-flares-couldnt-detect-before-2017-2">NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope</a>.</p><p>They were looking for additional signs of a pattern in the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/universe-expansion-crisis-cosmology-new-physics-hubble-constant-2019-10">cosmic microwave background</a> — the lingering radiation from the first light that traveled freely through the universe after the Big Bang. The CMB is like wallpaper behind all the galaxies in the universe.</p><div type="image" title="Planck cosmic microwave background" height="960" width="1920" msid="106958294" hostid="261"></div><p>There's one odd thing about it, though. The CMB is hotter (more microwaves) toward the constellation Leo and colder (fewer microwaves) in the other direction.</p><p>Astronomers think this is simply because of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/astronomer-animations-reveal-solar-system-physics-2021-10">our solar system</a>'s movement against the background, which is about 230 miles per second.</p><p>It's like an ambulance passing by, where the siren has one pitch as it approaches you, and sounds like another pitch as it recedes in the distance. This pattern in the CMB is called a dipole.</p><p>Kashlinsky wanted to test that theory about our solar system's movement by checking to see if there's a similar dipole pattern in other forms of light.</p><p>If other light forms have different patterns than the CMB, that would mean it's not just our solar system's movement creating the inconsistency. Something else is going on — possibly a yet-undiscovered event in the very first micro-moments of the universe's birth.</p><p>Such a discovery "could provide us with a glimpse into physical processes operating in the very early universe, potentially back to when it was less than a trillionth of a second old," coauthor Fernando Atrio-Barandela, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Salamanca in Spain, said in the NASA press release.</p><h2>An unexpected clue in one of the cosmos' biggest mysteries</h2><p>So Kashlinsky's group assessed the gamma-ray background — a diffuse glow of gamma rays that black holes and supernovae create across the cosmos.</p><div type="image" title="black hole x-ray burst" height="2700" width="4800" msid="106958557" hostid="261"></div><p>They found a distinct pattern, but it was 10 times stronger than it should be from the motion of our solar system.</p><p>What's more, the dipole pattern didn't match the one in the CMB. Instead, it matched the pattern of UHECRs.</p><p>The 2017 discovery that UHECRs had their own dipole pattern deepened the mystery around them. Now, the discovery that gamma rays have a similar dipole offers a new clue.</p><p>A <a target="_blank" href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acfedd">paper</a> describing the discovery was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on January 10.</p><p>Kashlinsky and his team think the gamma-ray and UHECR patterns might be related, but they're not sure how or why. Some unknown object or process out there in the universe may be producing both the gamma rays and the UHECRs.</p><p>To solve the mystery, "more work and better, more refined measurements of both are needed," Kashlinsky told Business Insider in an email.</p><p>To that end, his team plans to analyze more Fermi telescope data in the future.</p>

NASA telescope discovers mysterious hotspot of high-energy particles beyond our galaxy

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Scientists in Iceland want to drill straight into an underground magma chamber.</li><li>The project could offer  clues about how volcanoes work, as well as create geothermal energy.</li></ul><p>Scientists in Iceland want to drill a hole into a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/grindavik-iceland-magma-volcano-under-home-poised-for-eruption-evacuation-2023-11">magma chamber</a> about a mile underground in an attempt to generate limitless energy.</p><p>The <a target="_blank" href="https://kmt.is/about/">Krafla Magma Testbed</a> (KMT) aims to create the world's first research center above a magma chamber to monitor, sample, and test the molten rock in situ for the first time.</p><p>The center, it hopes, could offer unprecedented insights into how volcanoes work and open new avenues for limitless <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-geothermal-energy-google-2017-7">geothermal energy</a>.</p><p>"Magma within the Earth is the last unexplored frontier," KMT's Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson, told Business Insider.</p><div type="image" title="A crater is show letting off steam" height="1414" width="2121" msid="106866015" hostid="261" sizebytes="444650"></div><h2>An accidental discovery</h2><p>Research into magma chambers is crucial. These pools of molten rock, located in the Earth's crust, can create volcanoes if they find a way to reach the surface.</p><p>But they are fiendishly difficult to locate with surface equipment and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/muons-help-map-magma-inside-volcanoes-predict-eruptions-2021-11">hard to track</a> ahead of an eruption.</p><p>"We don't have any direct knowledge of what magma chambers look like, which is crucial in understanding volcanoes of course," Paolo Papale at Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Pisa, who has written on the subject, told <a target="_blank" href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134722-100-worlds-first-tunnel-to-a-magma-chamber-could-unleash-unlimited-energy/">New Scientist.</a></p><p>In 2009, scientists identified a potential candidate about 2.5 miles underground near the Krafla in Northern Iceland. So they started drilling.</p><p>But about a mile into their descent, their drill got stuck. It's only later, when it came back up carrying shards of volcanic glass, that they realized what happened. They had accidentally poked their head into a magma chamber.</p><p>The scientists managed to make a few measurements, but eventually, the wellhead became too warm to operate, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134722-100-worlds-first-tunnel-to-a-magma-chamber-could-unleash-unlimited-energy/">per New Scientist</a>.</p><p>They decided to pour cold water into the well to cool it down, releasing black, billowing clouds that destroyed their rigging.</p><p>Now, 15 years on, KMT wants to drill into the chamber again — but this time it wants to be able to stay, with the help of a few clever engineering tricks.</p><h2>Getting to the magma with a glassy rock 'sock'</h2><p>Krafla is a perfect site for this type of experiment. The magma there is ancient and gloopy, which means it's unlikely to create an eruption or flow out of the well when you experiment on it, said Ingólfsson.</p><p>Because it's so close to a volcano, any small tremors triggered by the scientists poking into the chamber are unlikely to make an impact, Jon Gluyas, a professor of Earth sciences at Durham University, told BI.</p><p>"If you're in Iceland, you're already in an extremely active volcanic region. There's nothing humans can do which materially will alter that one way or the other," said Gluyas.</p><p>However, standard drilling rigs can't survive in these conditions.</p><p>"It's bloody hot. And that means the materials you'll use for drilling are not right to those sorts of temperatures," said Gluyas.</p><p>One big challenge, Ingólfsson said, will be drilling straight into the magma while protecting the equipment.</p><p>The solution is fairly simple: freeze the magma solid. Using water, the team aims to freeze the magma ahead of the drill bit. This will create a "sock or a pocket" of frozen glassy rock, similar to the obsidian you can find on Earth, per Ingólfsson.</p><div type="image" title="a picture shows Obsidian, a glassy rock, shown buried in the ground." height="1412" width="2122" msid="106866018" hostid="261" sizebytes="470088"></div><p>Once that's big enough, the drill bit can be removed, creating a small cavity inside the chamber to deposit some monitoring equipment before the glass sock collapses, per Ingólfsson.</p><p>This should allow scientists to get an exact temperature reading of the inside of the magma chamber, which has never been done before, according to New Scientist.</p><p>"Will it work? That's definitely a challenge," said Ingólfsson.</p><p>"We think we have the equipment, we have the solutions, but it's very difficult to test those or get those accurate unless doing it in a real environment," he said.</p><p>Another problem will be keeping the rigging up, a crucial point as KMT wants the boreholes to stay open. The pipes that line the hole need to face extremely high temperatures, as well as acidic environments that can eat at the metal.</p><p>"We are working on selecting the right materials and finding out what is the best way to design these things so it will fit and survive," said Ingólfsson.</p><h2>We know very little about the insides of volcanoes</h2><p>If it is successful, KMT could offer a whole slew of new insights into volcanic activity, Gluyas said.</p><p>"From a scientific perspective, being able to sample an active magma chamber would give you a whole lot of information, which is normally excruciatingly difficult to obtain," said Gluyas, who is the president of the Global Geothermal Energy Advancement Association.</p><p>After all, most of what we know about volcanoes is what we see on the surface.</p><div type="image" title="Volcano" height="4019" width="6028" msid="106866020" hostid="261" sizebytes="3229702"></div><p>But by the time molten rock turns into lava, it has lost a lot of the gas that propelled it up to the surface, so we know very little about magma composition before it erupts.</p><p>"I'm sometimes insulting some scientists when I say that basically everything we know about inside of a volcano is kind of a guesstimate — an educated guesstimate of course," said Ingólfsson.</p><p>Sampling and monitoring the magma directly could shed crucial information on what it's made of, and hopefully help us find ways to track its path underground. The glassy rock created when freezing the magma could also be a gold mine of evidence, as it could contain bubbles encapsulating the precious magmatic gases, per Gluyas.</p><p>"There's loads of fundamental science which will come out of it and there'll be unexpected bonuses, but there is a practical piece of this, which is better understanding of the way the Earth behaves and therefore better preparedness for potential natural disasters," said Gluyas.</p><p>KMT plans to drill a second hole dedicated to geothermal research.</p><div type="image" title="A schematic shows two drill rigs above the magma chamber." height="840" width="778" msid="106866025" hostid="261" sizebytes="27718"></div><p>Ingólfsson expects one well on a magma chamber could be as productive as 10 other wells elsewhere.</p><p>Not only is it very hot down there, but the magma also changes the composition of the rock, which KMT believes could make harvesting geothermal energy more efficient.</p><p>"The source of geothermal is always the magma and getting closer to magma is obviously a higher efficiency," said Ingólfsson.</p><p>Their research, he said, could inform new ways to collect geothermal energy.</p><p>"You have the whole Atlantic ridge offshore. If we combine what we learn in Krafla and with what we know about offshore drilling, then you could foresee, at least as a sci-fi vision, that you could utilize it for abundant or endless energy of the Earth," he said.</p><div type="image" title="A top shot shows power stations near the borehole in Krafla." height="1333" width="2000" msid="106866028" hostid="261" sizebytes="122788"></div><p>For Gluyas, the technology could be promising, but he questioned whether it is needed at this time.</p><p>"If you go anywhere where there's a well-developed volcanic province, Mexico, Kenya, Ethiopia, Italy, the geothermal energy is under-exploited massively. I'm not sure how much more efficient systems would be if drilled into a magma chamber," he said.</p><h2>A short time to get a lot of money</h2><p>KMT hopes to break ground on the first hole into the magma chamber in 2026. But it still has a long road ahead.</p><p>Its biggest challenge is collecting the money to build the research center and start drilling the holes. Ingólfsson estimates that KMT will need to raise upward of $100 million from governmental organizations and industry partners.</p><p>"We sometimes say that geology has always been setting up the wrong poker table," said Ingólfsson.</p><p>"In space research, you are building telescopes, like for gamma rays, which cost billions of dollars. But in geology, two or 300 million is really expensive," he said.</p><p>But Ingólfsson is confident.</p><p>"The likelihood of us achieving something magnificent is very high in our opinion," he said.</p>

Iceland scientists want to drill a hole straight into a reservoir of molten magma about a mile underground. It could generate limitless energy. 

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.aau3181">K. Ulaczyk / J. Skowron / OGLE / Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw</a></span></p><p class="caption">Warsaw Telescope and Milky Way Cepheids discovered by the OGLE survey.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul class="summary-list"><li>Two giant bubbles of radiation - each up to 1,400 light-years across - are <a href="https://www.businessinsider.co.za/meerkat-telescope-ska-square-kilometre-array-telescope-gaint-bubbles-radiation-2019-9">expanding outward from the center of the Milky Way</a>.</li><li>A new study describes these never-before-seen bubbles, spotted for the first time by <a href="https://www.businessinsider.co.za/on-friday-sa-unveils-the-r44-billion-meerkat-telescope-heres-what-its-for-2018-7">South Africa's new MeerKAT telescope</a>.</li><li>Astronomers suspect the <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=5&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjfxdDyrc7kAhVlzlkKHVZeDkwQxfQBMAR6BAgFEAc&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.in%2Fmilky-ways-quiet-wimpy-black-hole-is-getting-hungrier-and-brighter%2Farticleshow%2F71098006.cms&amp;usg=AOvVaw1jpdkd5yLYbuEVutMJ8sz6">supermassive black hole</a> at the center of our galaxy entered into a "feeding frenzy" a few million years ago, swallowing massive lumps of gas and matter, and the bubbles are the black hole's consequent belch of radiation. </li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories</a>.</li></ul><p><span style="color: #222222;">The region at the center of our galaxy is still full of mysteries, but astronomers have just found a clue to its past: Huge, radio-emitting bubbles, extending 700 light-years either side of the galactic plane.</span></p><p>They could be, the researchers believe, the result of a huge eruption from our galaxy's supermassive <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/black-holes" target="_blank" title="black hole" rel="noopener">black hole</a>, Sagittarius A*. Millions of years ago that eruption would have punched into the interstellar medium in opposite directions from the supermassive black hole.</p><p>If "galactic bubbles" sound a bit familiar, it's important to clarify that these are <em>not</em> the <a href="https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/constellations/pages/bubbles.html">huge gamma-ray bubbles</a> discovered by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in 2010, nicknamed "Fermi bubbles," spanning above and below the galactic plane for a total distance of 50,000 light-years.</p><p>These latest bubbles, described <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1532-5">in a new study</a> in the journal Nature, are something new, and astronomers haven't seen them before. But they are amongst the biggest structures at the center of our galaxy, and they reveal new information about the dynamics of our galactic nucleus.</p><p>"The center of our galaxy is relatively calm when compared to other galaxies with very active central <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/black-holes" target="_blank" title="black holes" rel="noopener">black holes</a>," <a href="http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-09-11-towering-balloon-features-discovered-near-centre-milky-way">astrophysicist Ian Heywood of the University of Oxford said</a>.</p><p>"Even so, the Milky Way's central black hole can become uncharacteristically active, flaring up as it periodically devours massive clumps of dust and gas. It's possible that one such feeding frenzy triggered powerful outbursts that inflated this previously unseen feature," Heywood added.</p><h2>An accidental discovery by a South African telescope</h2><p>Hints of the structures <a href="https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984Natur.310..557Y/abstract">first emerged in the 1980s</a>, when astronomer and physicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University and colleagues discovered something strange in the galactic center: long, thin, highly organised and highly magnetized filaments of gas, tens of light-years long and just one light-year wide, emitting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation">synchrotron</a> radio waves.</p><p>These strange structures hadn't been observed anywhere else, and their origin <a href="https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2017-35">remained a mystery</a> for decades.</p><p>But something changed. The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory's <a href="http://www.ska.ac.za/science-engineering/meerkat/">MeerKAT telescope</a> was built, consisting of 64 interconnected radio antennae that offer "unprecedented" sensitivity in radio wavelengths, perfectly positioned in the Southern Hemisphere to take deep images of the galactic center.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MeerKAT_Radio_Telescope.jpg">Morganoshell/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></p><p class="caption">A photograph of the MeerKAT Radio Telescope, taken March 2016.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>The international team turned the telescope on the heart of the Milky Way. And, for the first time, they were able to see the structures of these radio bubbles, faint but detectable, amidst the incredibly radio-bright glare in the region.</p><p>The event that caused it could be responsible for accelerating the electrons that resulted in the synchrotron emission observed in the filaments in the galactic center.</p><p>"The radio bubbles discovered with MeerKAT now shed light on the origin of the filaments," <a href="http://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2019/09/milky-way/">Yusef-Zadeh said</a>. "Almost all of the more than 100 filaments are confined by the radio bubbles."</p><h2>'A staggeringly powerful event ... near our galaxy's central black hole'</h2><p>The entire hourglass-shaped structure extends 1,400 light-years, and is unusually symmetrical. This symmetry provides some clues as to what created them; the size, constrained by the speed of light, puts an upper limit of a few million years on their age.</p><p>"The shape and symmetry of what we have observed strongly suggests that a staggeringly powerful event happened a few million years ago very near our galaxy's central black hole," astronomer William Cotton from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory said.</p><p>This eruption was possibly triggered by vast amounts of interstellar gas falling in on the black hole, or a massive burst of star formation which sent shockwaves careening through the galactic center.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#mediaviewer/File:PIA16695-BlackHole-Corona-20130227.jpg">NASA/JPL/Caltech</a></span></p><p class="caption">Artist's impression of a black hole.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>"In effect, this inflated energetic bubbles in the hot, ionized gas near the galactic center, energizing it and generating radio waves which we could eventually detect here on Earth," Cotton added.</p><p>Although the radio bubbles are smaller and less energetic than the Fermi bubbles - it's possible that similar events created both sets of bubbles, the researchers said.</p><p>It's even possible that both sets of bubbles were created by a linked series of events. Perhaps future observations across a range of wavelengths can tell us more.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/event-horizon-telescope-black-hole-snaps-first-image-messier-87-2019-4">Here's how astronomers took the first image of a black hole that's located 55 million light years away</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

The black hole at the center of our galaxy just belched two giant bubbles of radiation

<ul class="summary-list"><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/space">Space</a> is a dangerous and unfriendly place not suited for human life, yet <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/astronaut">astronauts</a> are sent up to the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/international-space-station">International Space Station</a> every year.</li><li>From exposure to high levels of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/radiation">radiation</a> to surviving in micro-gravity conditions, space can be a tough place to live. </li><li>Without gravity working on your body, your bones and muscles start to break down. Bone density drops by over 1% per month.</li><li>On Earth, gravity compresses our spinal cords. But in space, the microgravity environment stretches the spine and astronauts can get a couple inches taller.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.</a> </li></ul><p><em>Following is a transcript of the video.</em></p><p><strong>Narrator:</strong> In 2016, astronaut Scott Kelly returned to Earth after nearly a year on the International Space Station. But when he came back, he was 2 inches taller. So, what exactly happened up there, and what does that mean for the future of space travel?</p><p><strong>Narrator:</strong> If you're planning a trip to the International Space Station, be prepared to feel weightless. The station orbits the planet every 90 minutes, moving at more than 17,000 miles per hour. That's 30 times faster than a commercial jet aircraft. As a result, astronauts on board live in a constant state of free fall, or weightlessness.</p><p><strong>Garrett Reisman:</strong> Being up there in microgravity is awesome. It's, like, the coolest thing, because it's like you have the power to fly.</p><p><strong>Narrator:</strong> That's Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who's logged 107 days in space. There are a few immediate side effects, he says, when you first experience microgravity.</p><p><strong>Reisman:</strong> So the first thing you really feel is you feel kinda sick. You don't feel very good those first couple days. It's kinda like being airsick or seasick. We call it space-adaptation sickness. Your vestibular system, your organs that provide information to the brain about your rotation and your acceleration, they're not working that great without being in gravity.</p><p><strong>Narrator:</strong> Without gravity working on your body, your bones and muscles start to break down, too. In fact, bone density drops by over 1% per month. By comparison, the rate of bone loss for elderly men and women is around 1% to 1.5% per year. And, because it doesn't take much effort to float through space, your muscles lose strength and endurance pretty quickly.</p><p><strong>Reisman:</strong> You have to work out every day. So, they scheduled two hours a day pretty much every day while I was on the space station for working out. What we found was, if you do enough resistive exercise, you can halt the effects of the bone loss and the muscle atrophy.</p><p><strong> Narrator:</strong> Without gravity pulling them down, fluids pool in the body, tricking it into thinking it's carrying too much water. As a result, astronauts have to pee... a lot. This makes it easy for them to get dehydrated and develop kidney stones.</p><p><strong>Reisman:</strong> So, you have a shift in your fluid. A lot of the blood volume that normally is down in your legs ends up up here, and your chest kinda puffs up and your face puffs up, and you can see it. If you look at pictures of us on the space station, it looks like we put on some weight or something and we're all puffed up.</p><p><strong> Narrator:</strong> Swelling in the upper body puts pressure on the eyes as well, which can cause vision problems.</p><p>Reisman: A lot of us, including myself, had a shift in our vision while we're up in space. You start out, everything was fine, and all of a sudden things get blurry. We could see the effects of it. We could see swelling in the optic nerve, we could see folds in the cornea, but we're still not 100% sure exactly what's causing it and how to stop it.</p><p><strong> Narrator:</strong> With all the challenges of space travel, one benefit is you actually get taller.</p><p><strong>Reisman:</strong> So, yes, you do get taller when you go to space. It's the whole reason I signed up for this job. Your spine is being compressed by gravity. So, when you go into the microgravity environment and you no longer have any kind of compressive loads on the spine at all, it stretches. I grew about an inch.</p><p><strong>Astronaut:</strong> Woo-hoo!</p><p><strong>Narrator:</strong> Without gravity working against it, the heart doesn't have to work as hard to pump blood throughout the body. Over time, this could lead to the heart actually decreasing in size.</p><p><strong>Reisman:</strong> There is an effect on the cardiovascular system about being up in space. So you do get a reduced aerobic capability. You can be in great shape, and after being up in space for a couple days, you might get on the treadmill, and you might be like, "Man, I must not have been hitting the gym."</p><p><strong> Narrator:</strong> The immune system also takes a hit. Researchers discovered that a lack of gravity weakens the functions of T cells, which play a crucial role in fighting off diseases.</p><p><strong>Narrator:</strong> Another concern is cosmic radiation. Astronauts on the station are exposed to over 10 times the amount of radiation that we get on Earth.</p><p><strong>Reisman:</strong> At a couple hundred miles, we're well above the atmosphere, but we're still well below the magnetic field of the Earth. But we still get a large bit of protection from that magnetic field. In fact, you could tell, because when you close your eyes, you see little lightning bolts, and that's actually a result of some of the radiation hitting your eyeballs and releasing photons.</p><p><strong>Narrator:</strong> Artificial shielding on the ISS only partially protects astronauts from harsh radiation, leaving them more susceptible to cancer and other diseases later in life.</p><p><strong>Narrator:</strong> Finally, astronauts must also be able to handle the psychological challenges of confinement and isolation.</p><p><strong>Reisman:</strong> So, there is a psychological aspect to being in space, both because of the fact that you're isolated from the rest of humanity, it was really strange to be looking out the window at billions of people down there that had no way to get to me. When I was there, I only had two crewmates at a time on the space station, so if you don't get along with somebody, that could be bad, because you don't have too many choices there in making new friends.</p><p><strong>Narrator:</strong> And, without a 24-hour sleep cycle, astronaut circadian rhythm is thrown off, which can cause more stress and lead to sleep disorders.</p><p><strong>Reisman:</strong> You're taking jet lag to a whole nother extreme. Well, the weird thing is that you go around the planet once every hour and a half. So every 45 minutes, the sun is either rising or setting. So you can't, like, tell what time it is by looking out the window.</p><p><strong>Narrator:</strong> So, what does all this mean for the future of space travel? Well, a trip to Mars would expose astronauts to even more dangers than those on the International Space Station. They would face higher levels of radiation, shifting gravity fields, and longer travel times, which would compound all of the negative effects of space on the human body and mind.</p><p><strong>Reisman:</strong> I think the biggest issue we gotta deal with is the radiation. We don't know precisely what that exact radiation does to human beings. But what does gamma rays or what does heavy ions, what do they do human tissue? We don't really know.</p><p><strong>Narrator:</strong> Right now, NASA and other research organizations are working to develop better technology that protects astronauts against these hazards, so maybe one day humans might make it to Mars.</p>

What happens to the human body in space

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="NASA/JPL-Caltech" title_caption="NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity recorded this view just after reaching the summit of " Cape="" Tribulation="" on="" the="" western="" rim="" of="" Endeavour="" Crater="" Jan.="" Martian="" day.="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/54b7e5f76bb3f70808bd40ee-960/pia19098_hires.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA19098">NASA/JPL-Caltech</a></span></p><p class="caption">NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity recorded this view just after reaching the summit of "Cape Tribulation," on the western rim of Endeavour Crater, on Jan. 6, 2015, the 3,894th Martian day.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Mars is a frozen wasteland devoid of <a href="http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-solar-system/life-on-mars.html">life</a>, <a href="http://www.racetomars.ca/mars/article_water.jsp">liquid water</a>, and <a href="http://science.howstuffworks.com/mars5.htm">breathable atmosphere</a>. So why are companies like <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-colonizing-mars-2014-1">SpaceX</a> and <a href="https://medium.com/matter/all-dressed-up-for-mars-and-nowhere-to-go-7e76df527ca0">Mars One</a> so bent on colonizing such unfriendly territory?</p>
<p>"Human beings have always looked to expand the territory that we can live in," former NASA astronaut Jeffrey A. Hoffman told Business Insider. We spoke with Hoffman at <a href="http://www.worldchangingideassummit.com/">BBC FUTURE's World-Changing Ideas Summit</a> about what it will take to colonize Mars. "You'll find people who are willing to go and live there because they can."</p>
<p>Hoffman is even confident that if we set our minds to it, then we have a good chance of successfully colonizing the Red planet. "Life is always looking for new environmental niches and habitats and often evolves to be able to live there," he said.</p>
<p>Humans must overcome many obstacles between the Mars we know today and establishing a future Mars Metropolis. The two biggest hurdles standing in our way right now are radiation and technology, Hoffman said.</p>
<h2>Ruthless Radiation</h2>
<p>"The first [hurdle] is the radiation that you're exposed to when you're in deep space and there's a lot of research going on there now," to figure out how to deal with this limitation, Hoffman said.</p>
<p>Since 2008, more than <a href="http://spaceradiation.usra.edu/research/fundedProjects.pdf">40 scientists</a> at institutions across the country have been studying what space radiation does to the human body and how to mitigate those effects. Moreover, NASA has established <a href="http://spaceradiation.usra.edu/research/">nearly a dozen</a> specialized centers of research in this field.</p>
<p>The sun is primary source of harmful radiation that astronauts would face on their way to Mars. Powerful bursts from the sun called solar flares, like the one shown below, release lethal doses of radiation with the power of 160 billion megatons of TNT.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="NASA" title_caption="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/54418050ecad042c03388166-960/solar flares and the sun.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Kact6QHG0">NASA</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>We are safe here on Earth because our planet's magnetic field and thick atmosphere protect us from these radiation blasts, but there's no protection in space. During deep space flights, astronauts would be bombarded by dangerous, high-energy radiation, like x-rays and gamma rays, from solar flares.</p>
<p>The human body can handle certain kinds of radiation in small doses, but the longer you are exposed the more likely your body will blow past those "safe" radiation levels into the danger zone. The result is a <a href="http://www.nsbri.org/SCIENCE-and-TECHNOLOGY/Radiation-Effects/">series of scary symptoms</a> like vomiting, fatigue, changes to white blood cell count, and impaired immune system, all of which could jeopardize an astronaut's ability to do much else.</p>
<p>Long term, radiation exposure will increase astronauts' risk of developing cancer and can also lead to damaged cardiovascular system, eyes, and central nervous system.</p>
<p>In order to colonize Mars, we first need to get there safely and in good health. That's why it's so important that scientists find a way to protect astronauts before they travel anywhere far from Earth, Hoffman said.</p>
<p>"There's various avenues," he explained. "There's new types of radiation shielding. Of course, if we had better rockets, we could get there faster and you wouldn't be exposed to as much radiation. And then there's also genetic investigations that people have different sensitivities to radiation and there may be also <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/potassium-iodide-protects-troops-from-nuclear-fallout-2012-4">pharmacological ways</a> of mitigating the impact of radiation."</p>
<h2>Making The Most Of Martian Resources</h2>
<p>The second hurdle to colonization, Hoffman said, is the technology that will help humans survive on Mars.</p>
<p>"If you're going to spend any significant amount of time on Mars, you ought to be able to use Martian resources to help survive because it's extremely expensive to bring anything to Mars from Earth."</p>
<p>According to NASA, it costs <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/background/facts/astp.html_prt.htm">$10,000 to send a single pound</a> of payload into space. However, the space agency is working on next-generation launch vehicles to be ready for long-term space travel by 2025, and they hope these new vehicles will reduce the price tag down to $100 per pound. Helping push this goal forward is SpaceX's attempts to make <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-falcon-9-reusablity-ocean-landing-2015-1">rockets reusable</a>, which would save the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to build a new rocket for every space-bound launch.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Bryan Versteeg/Mars One Foundation" title_caption="All components of Mars One's settlement are slated to reach their destination by 2021. The hardware includes two living units, two life-support units, a second supply unit and two rovers." class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/52a75ea7ecad04b67ba3e540-960/mars-one-colony-2022.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span>Bryan Versteeg/Mars One Foundation</span></p><p class="caption">All components of Mars One's settlement are slated to reach their destination by 2021. The hardware includes two living units, two life-support units, a second supply unit and two rovers.</p></div><p></p></div></div>In addition to the cost, there's <a href="http://www.space.com/24701-how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-mars.html">the time it takes</a> to send anything to Mars to consider. On average, Earth and Mars are 140 million miles apart. The fastest spacecraft NASA ever launched, the <a href="http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/">New Horizons mission</a>, left Earth in 2006 traveling through space at 36,000 miles per hour. At that pace, it would take a spacecraft 162 days, 5.5 months, to travel 140 million miles.</p>
<p>With limited space for payloads and long periods of space travel, future Mars colonizers will have to make the most of the resources available on Mars.</p>
<p>"We know that Mars has carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. It has all the elements that we need so we could - in principle - live off the land given sufficient energy and solar energy," Hoffman said. "Maybe set up nuclear reactors or maybe a fusion reactor if we have fusion by that time. That would make a big difference."</p>
<h2>A Recipe For Success</h2>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="BatteryIncluded on Wikimedia Commons" title_caption="A breakdown of the components inside of the MOXIE oxygen-generator." class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/54ad8d226bb3f7a01aba7179-960/moxie_o2_generator.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Oxygen_ISRU_Experiment#mediaviewer/File:MOXIE_O2_generator.jpg">BatteryIncluded on Wikimedia Commons</a></span></p><p class="caption">A breakdown of the components inside of the MOXIE oxygen-generator.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Hoffman is a principle investigator for an intriguing machine that is scheduled to go to Mars in the next decade aboard NASA's Mars 2020 mission.</p>
<p>Called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resources Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, the instrument is designed to convert carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into oxygen.</p>
<p>If successful, Hoffman and <a href="http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/going-red-planet">his colleagues at MIT</a> hope to design an even larger version of MOXIE that they hope could produce enough oxygen to both supply astronauts on long explorations across the Martian surface and be used to fuel rockets that would return astronauts to Earth.</p>
<p>"Given sufficient energy and sufficient chemicals that we have on Mars we could live off the land. And that will be a giant step in actually living on another planet," Hoffman said.</p>

You Searched For "biggest gamma ray" and got 6 results

An explosion 4 billion light years from Earth released more energy than the Sun can generate in its entire lifespan

Prabhjote Gill

NASA telescope discovers mysterious hotspot of high-energy particles beyond our galaxy

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

Iceland scientists want to drill a hole straight into a reservoir of molten magma about a mile underground. It could generate limitless energy.

Marianne Guenot

The black hole at the center of our galaxy just belched two giant bubbles of radiation

Michelle Starr

What happens to the human body in space

Amber Bragdon,Amber Bragdon

These Are The 2 Big Hurdles To Setting Up A Mars Colony

Jessica Orwig

Popular Keywords

Buying Guides