At this point, we’re a bit more aware of where exactly our place in the universe is compared to all the people that came before. Our dinky little planet is situated third in orbit from the Sun, in a Solar System that’s sitting in one of the arms of the Milky Way Galaxy. Frankly, the chain goes on from there, but we all feel completely fine with knowing just those.
But, as we’ve come to expect, the universe is far from being completely understood. We always find more stuff to discover right around our galactic neighborhood and beyond—and, at least according to new research that’s available for preprint over at arXiv, we might be “trapped” inside a structure that we can’t even see. (Well, not normally, anyway.)
You see, beyond the reaches of our Solar System, there lies a structure known as the North Polar Spur. a large yellow gas cloud above our galactic plane which emits both X-rays and radio waves. A similar structure, known as the Fan Region, is a bit less understood, but is also known to emit polarized radio waves. The two were discovered back in the 1960s, and have always been thought to be structures independent of each other.
However, new insights into the two reveal that they may be more intertwined than we thought. A team of scientists discovered that the two entities may be “linked” in a magnetic sense. For one, the two structures in the sky produce what the team called “tendrils” of charged particles with a magnetic field, which project outwards from their structures. These tendrils seem to aggregate towards and interact with each other, forming what appears to be a “magnetic tunnel” where the tendrils form what appear to be lights along the walls of the tunnel.
The tunnel tends to curve, and computer models reveal these tendrils to be about 1,000 light-years long and were about 350 light-years away from our own Solar System. And while the structure itself is hidden to the naked eye—it can only be seen with polarized radio waves—it’s definitely big; it easily engulfs the entire Solar System and even nearby stars inside its “tunnel” structure.
The find comes as the latest in a long line of new discoveries about our very own Milky Way Galaxy and the universe beyond it, as detailed by previous findings about a “mysterious” radio source from our galactic center, as well as the standout readings from the XENON1T dark-matter detector—which may, in fact, be our first detection of dark energy instead of the originally-intended dark matter reading.
“If we were to look up in the sky, we would see this tunnel-like structure in just about every direction we looked — that is, if we had eyes that could see radio light,” said University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics astronomer Jennifer West, who made the initial proposal.
According to West and team, the structures are not just localized to our own corner of the sky; in fact, these structures are ubiquitous in the galaxy, and can shine with various kinds of light apart from radio. Spotting and studying these structures, they say, may lead to new insights into gas clouds—and perhaps even how and why galaxies look and form the way they do.
West continued: “Magnetic fields don’t exist in isolation. They all must connect to each other. So, [the] next step is to better understand how this local magnetic field connects both to the larger-scale galactic magnetic field and also to the smaller-scale magnetic fields of our sun and Earth.”
West and team plan to confirm their findings by comparing the outputs of their model to detailed observations of the actual region in the sky they modeled, then refine their model accordingly with the data they obtained with this manner. Doing so may lead to better understanding of these ubiquitous magnetic “filaments” spotted around our own galaxy. The team also considers the possibility that these invisible “threads” may form a larger, invisible structure that spans the galaxy and maybe even beyond.
Finally, West added: “I think it’s just awesome to imagine that these structures are everywhere, whenever we look up into the night sky.”
References
- Klesman, A. (2020, February 1). Why is a parsec 3.26 light-years? Astronomy.Com. https://astronomy.com/magazine/ask-astro/2020/02/why-is-a-parsec-326-light-years
- Turner, B. (2021, October 22). 1,000-light-year-long cosmic ropes may surround Earth, and scientists don’t know why. Livescience.Com. https://www.livescience.com/earth-inside-giant-magnetic-tunnel
- West, J. L., Landecker, T. L., Gaensler, B. M., Jaffe, T., & Hill, A. S. (2021). A unified model for the fan region and the north polar spur: A bundle of filaments in the local galaxy. ArXiv:2109.14720 [Astro-Ph]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14720
