Something Strange Is Glowing in the Milky Way Right Now

[Music] from the ancient times of human civilization to this very day we've always looked up at the stars with an unwavering desire to know what's out there we've come a long way especially with advanced space technology on our side but the universe still leaves us with more questions than answers like what is that mysterious thing glowing in the center of our galaxy it all started around 10 years ago when NASA launched the Fermi gamma-ray Space Telescope this wasn't your standard point-and-shoot telescope it's such an advanced piece of equipment that it literally opened a huge window on the universe allowing us to see things we wouldn't have been able to otherwise you might remember learning about the electromagnetic spectrum in school you've got the weakest radio waves on the far left visible light that's what the human eye can see in the middle and the strongest gamma rays on the far right so when you observe the sky through a gamma-ray telescope rather than with your own eyes you'd be looking at a totally different picture when the astronomers started getting data back from the Fermi telescope they noticed that the center of our galaxy was emitting a lot more gamma radiation than say it's outskirts to put it simply something is glowing incredibly bright right in the middle of the Milky Way but the most perplexing thing is that no one has been able to find an exact explanation for this phenomenon for nearly a decade sure there have been several theories from the very beginning some scientists hope that the mysterious glow is somehow connected to the long sought after an enigmatic dark matter this stuff's existence has been theorized for years and scientists are pretty much certain that it exists even more so they say it makes up about 27% of the entire universe for comparison ordinary matter like what makes up everything here on earth adds up to only 5% of the universe's composition if you're wondering about the remaining 68% that would be dark energy which oversees the fast growth of the universe but dark energy is a topic for a whole nother video for now let's get back to this dark matter business there's a theory that it works as a sort of glue that keeps things together thanks to this sticky stuff galaxies don't split apart stars don't collide with one another and our earth doesn't stray off its orbit into open space let's put that in a language that anyone can understand pizza imagine the crust is dark energy the pepperoni mushrooms and all the toppings are ordinary matter in galaxy clusters the goopy melted cheese holding it all in place that's dark matter oh and by calling it dark matter scientists aren't talking about the color they just mean that this space phenomenon doesn't emit either any radiation or light visible to the human eye also matter if you understand this word like a substance doesn't mean that you can touch dark matter if you ever find it it just behaves like the matter you as well as everything around you are made of for example it has the same gravitational pull as ordinary matter dark energy however doesn't behave this way anyway let's go back to the glowing gamma rays in the heart of our galaxy what does this have to do with all that talk about dark matter well some astronomers suppose that the central region of the Milky Way was glowing with such intensity because dark matter was getting destroyed there well nobody has ever observed this Dark Matter annihilation scientists have been hypothesizing about this phenomenon for a long time naturally we wouldn't be able to see dark matter itself but the process could be producing the radiation the gamma ray telescope spotted that's why they got so excited that this could be just the proof they needed here's the theory if particles of dark matter lighted just like ordinary matter particles do in particle accelerators they'd annihilate one another as a result they'd burst in a shower of other particles including the ones that make up gamma rays but that's where the problem lies if the mystifying glow was created by Dark Matter annihilation then gamma ray particles would get distributed in space evenly but the telescope showed them gathering in clumps so to the great disappointment of numerous supporters the theory based on dark matter was busted but there is an alternative explanation of why the milky way is glowing the culprit might be a group of millisecond pulsars which are neutron stars rotating really really fast that is about a thousand times per second you can't notice a separate pulsar since it produces too little light but a group of them is a different story let's delve a bit deeper into the topic of pulsars imagine a light house its job is to keep ships and boats from crashing into the rocks pulsars are the lighthouses of the universe although not in the meaning that they save spacecraft from collision it's more in the fact that they emit focused beams of radiation that you can only see if you get in their path hence the name of these neutron stars they look like they're pulsating up there in space when a supermassive star with a mass equal to four to eight of our Suns dies it either becomes a supernova or turns into a black hole with stars that are up to three times the mass of the Sun aren't heavy enough to do that that's why most of them end up collapsing and turning into neutron stars or pulsars after that happens the former star becomes much smaller and as a result its rotational speed grows so dramatically that these space objects start to spin unimaginably fast and how about this the incredible density of pulsars makes scientists believe that if there was life on these stars it would be two-dimensional like in a comic book that's because the gravity there is so strong that it would flatten anything on its surface on top of that it seems that pulsars can have planets of their own although it's unclear whether those are original or the Pulsar just captured them one day and pulled them away from their orbits our Milky Way is home to more than a billion neutron stars and around 200,000 of them are pulsars if a pulsar were to enter our solar system one day it'd be a bad situation to say the least the spinning invader would wreak havoc and chaos by throwing the planets off their orbits probably pulling away one or two of them it would also cause unimaginably powerful tides that could literally rip the earth apart and let's not forget about its gamma radiation if even one jet of radiation from a pulsar hit our planet it would destroy the whole ozone layer in a matter of minutes and we need that ozone to keep this planet warm and to protect it from ultraviolet radiation coming from the Sun so without it earth would be uninhabitable good thing that's pretty much an impossible scenario Oh first for all that planet destroying stuff to happen a pulsar we need to get relatively close to Earth but the closest neutron star we know of is still 500 light years away plus the Pulsar would have to be lined up with our planet in a way for its cataclysmic jet of gamma radiation to reach us otherwise it would miss so is that what's lighting up the center of our Milky Way the Pulsar theory is plausible like I said before the glow coming from there is clumpy rather than smooth that sort of pattern often happens when the source of the energy is one individual object such as a pulsar several studies have concluded that due to the nature of the light millisecond pulsars are the best explanation for this phenomenon but that doesn't mean all scientists are convinced they state that these clumps may be the result of the interaction of gas between stars and cosmic rays besides the Pulsar Theory has one more catch why would so many of them be clustered together in a perfect sphere around the center of the galaxy it's likely that the clusters of stars that orbit the Milky Way could have been disrupted by the galaxy's gravity and as a result spilled some stars here and there that could have included pulsars that later formed a spherical shell around the heart of the Milky Way but in fact the whole picture looks like something completely different from both pulsars and dark matter so in the end scientists are still left with more questions than the answers and a lot more researching to do for any conclusive findings guess we'll just have to wait and see now what in your opinion is the source of the mysterious glow in the center of the Milky Way let me know down in the comments if you learn something new today then give this video a like and share it with a friend but hey don't go ejecting your Dark Matter just yet we have over 2,000 cool videos for you to check out all you have to do is pick the left or right video click on it and enjoy stay on the bright side of life [Music]

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE

Views: 606,463

Rating: 4.7619085 out of 5

Keywords: outer space, the universe, space, planets, stars, astronomy, astrophysics, space facts, Milky Way, recent discoveries, solar system, facts about the Universe, fun science, the Earth, dark matter, dark energy, bizarre phenomena, the galaxy, pulsars, supermassive stars, neutron stars, scary scenarios

Id: fwmtCHYG7Qg

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 22 2019