DDA 2015 – Solving the Mystery of the Fermi Bubbles?

This is one of a series of notes taken during the 2015 meeting of the AAS Division on Dynamical Astronomy, 3-7 May, at CalTech. An index to this series (all the papers presented at the meeting) is here.

David F. Bartlett (UC Boulder)

Abstract

The Fermi Bubbles are large structures that stretch symmetrically between galactic latitudes of -55 degrees and +55 degrees and between galactic longitudes of -45 degrees and +45 degrees. For almost a decade they have been under the intense scrutiny of the Fermi-Large Area Telescope, a gamma-ray detector in orbit about the earth. The Bubbles remain mysterious: are the gamma-rays – with energies up to a few hundred GeV – produced by hadrons or do they come from inverse Compton scattering of galactic electrons with the low energy interstellar radiation field? Why are the edges of the bubbles only 3 degree wide? How old are the bubbles? For some time we have been considering a non-Newtonian cosinusoidal potential $U=-\dfrac{G M}{r} \cos(k_0 r)$, and its complement, a non-Coulombic electric potential $U=Q \exp(-k_0 r)$. In both cases, $k_0 = 2 \pi/400$ pc. In this talk we present evidence that our putative potentials acting in concert can help answer the mysteries of the Bubbles.

Notes

  • Oh my…

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