Most Powerful Gamma Rays Ever Detected at the Center of the Milky Way

Gamma rays coming from space can pass through your body, damaging cells and messing with the way they work. They can make your body extremely sick and lead to serious health problems. And now scientists have detected the most powerful gamma rays ever seen coming from the center of our home Milky Way galaxy. At 13,000 ft above sea level on the Sierra Negra volcano in Mexico, scientists operate the high alitude water cherankov observatory. From there they monitor extremely high energy events in space and recently they have detected extremely powerful gamma rays coming from the center of the Milky Way. They're among the most energetic events ever observed. It matters because it shows that something tremendously intense is happening at the

center of our own galaxy. By studying these gamma rays, scientists can figure out what kind of extreme events are going on there and whether they're going to affect us here on Earth. There's no other way we can see such things. So researchers carefully analyze the data and manage to trace those rays back to a certain region near the center of our galaxy. You see, the central region of the Milky Way is very active. It has dense gas clouds, neutron stars, white dwarfs, and a super massive black hole. Dust and gas block most forms of light. It's why this area is difficult to observe directly. Gamma rays can pass through these dense

regions and allow scientists to study processes that would otherwise stay hidden. That's how they revealed a pevatron. Something extremely powerful that can speed up particles to insanely high energies, way higher than anything we can make on Earth. Pvetrons are like giant natural particle accelerators in space. They take tiny particles, usually protons or bits of atoms, flying through space, and boost them to crazy speeds almost as fast as light. This happens in the most extreme places you can imagine, like exploding and newborn stars or those creepy regions around super massive black holes. In other words, places that have enough energy to act like massive engines. Finding such horses is not easy. The events that

create them are rare. And apparently, something like this is happening in our own galaxy. When the conditions are right, these engines push particles to huge energies. Once a particle gets that much energy, it doesn't keep it forever. At some point, it crashes into something, gas, dust, or magnetic fields. When that happens, it suddenly loses energy and releases it as incredibly powerful gamma rays. They travel across space and eventually reach Earth, but they don't get to the ground directly. Earth's atmosphere blocks them. When they hit the atmosphere, they break apart and create a shower of smaller, safer particles that spread out through the air.

Scientists can detect these particles. Hawk is especially good at spotting them using huge water tanks. When a super fast particle moves through the water faster than light can travel there, it produces a blue flash called a Tenov light. By watching that flash, scientists can figure out where the particle came from, how fast it was, and how much energy it had. A star is like a cosmic engine, crushing atoms together under insane pressure and blasting light and heat across billions of miles.

Now, combine it with a black hole, a trap so powerful that even light can't escape it. The monstrosity you get as a result seems like stuff from science fiction, but might actually be a very real space object. When the James Web Space Telescope started looking at the universe in 2022, it spotted something super bizarre. There were these tiny red dots scattered across the sky, and they were from times when the universe was very young. It was something no one had ever seen. So astronomers were totally baffled, but they still managed to cook up a few theories. So one idea was that these red dots were many galaxies, but not your regular small galaxies. These would be only 2% the size of the Milky Way packed with so many stars that it would make

them a cosmic mosh pit. But that would be so dense it might just break the laws of physics. So this theory isn't very plausible. Could those dots be quazars? Glowing star devouring black holes? No. They're too faint for that. And if a black hole that big existed in something so tiny, the galaxy would be like a backpack trying to carry an elephant. Not going to happen. It's time to get acquainted with a Lo, known for his pretty extravagant ideas about civilizations from other planets, and his teammate Fabio Pikuchi. They think these little red dots are galaxies, but super tiny because they haven't even started spinning yet. Picture a baby galaxy still learning to walk. Hey, there you go.

This idea comes from the main theory of how galaxies form. They grow inside halos of hypothetical dark matter, the invisible stuff that makes up 85% of all the universe's mass. You can't see it or touch it, but its gravity acts like cosmic glue. pulling galaxies together. And those tiny red galaxies could be cradled in dark matter, waiting to start spinning and growing into the big galaxies we see today. The astronomers think these baby galaxies could live in halos that spin super slowly, more slowly than 99% of halos in the universe. It's easier to picture if you imagine holding a rope and spinning around. Spin fast and the rope flies out. spin slowly and the rope just droops to the ground. That's exactly what could have happened

with these galaxies. The halos were too slow to stretch them out, so they kept the galaxies tiny. This could help explain why we only see such red dots in the universe's baby pictures. Over time, the halos would speed up and the galaxies inside would grow and spread out, eventually looking like the galaxies we're used to. Lo explained it like this. Dark matter halos have a rotational velocity. Some spin fast, some spin slowly. If you assume that these little red dots are in the slowest 1% of halos, all the strange things we see about them suddenly make sense. But the thing is, this isn't the only explanation. Two other teams of astronomers have recently suggested that these dots could be something

totally new, a type of cosmic object they call black hole stars. An international group of astronomers and physicists, including experts from Penn State, think these dots are actually giant balls of hot gas that are so dense they look like the atmospheres of normal stars. But instead of being powered by nuclear fusion like regular stars, these are fueled by super massive black holes in their centers. The black holes gobble up matter, turning it into energy. And that energy gives off the light we see. After looking at enough red dots, scientists found one with so much atmosphere that it couldn't be explained as just a bunch of normal stars in a tiny galaxy. Instead, it's basically one enormous very cold star. Now, cold stars don't emit as much light

because their temperatures are low compared to your typical stars. Most stars in the universe are low mass, colder stars, but they're usually hard to spot because the brighter massive stars shamelessly steal the show. As for these black hole stars, they shine in the red and near infrared wavelengths. It's light we can't see with our own eyes anymore. And even though the gas around super massive black holes is usually millions of degrees hot, the red dot black hole stars could be surrounded by very cold gas like a low mass stars atmosphere. This could explain why they glow so faintly. So in other words, what we thought were tiny galaxies full of stars might be single giant stars powered by black holes.

Now, let's figure out how the James Web Space Telescope helped astronomers make this discovery in the first place. It's one of the most powerful telescopes in space. It was designed to look all the way back to the birth of the universe using infrared instruments to detect light from the oldest stars and galaxies. Basically, it's a time machine that allows scientists to see the universe as it was about 13 1/2 billion years ago, right near the beginning of everything. The moment the James Web started scanning the skies, astronomers noticed tiny red dots popping up everywhere. And those objects were way too massive for what galaxy models predicted. At first, the team thought they were just

mature galaxies, which get redder as their stars age. But the dots were way too bright. To explain them as galaxies, the stars would have to be packed together so tightly that it seemed physically impossible. You see, a galaxy like that would make the night sky blindingly bright. To figure out the mystery, the scientists needed spectra. That's data showing how much light the objects gave off at different wavelengths. Between January and December 2024, they spent nearly 60 hours of James Webb time collecting spectra from 4,500 distant galaxies.

It's one of the biggest spectroscopic data sets ever taken with web, and it gave astronomers an unprecedented peak at the dawn of space. In July 2024, the team spotted an incredibly extreme object. It immediately grabbed their attention. They nicknamed it the clip because it became the perfect test case to figure out what those mysterious red dots really were. The object spectrum showed an enormous amount of mass, the most extreme case of its kind detected so early in the universe. The light from the cliff had traveled nearly 12 billion years to reach Earth. But the weirdest thing was that spectral analysis showed that the light wasn't coming from a cluster of stars at all. It was coming from a super massive black hole.

This black hole was pulling in surrounding matter at an incredible rate, wrapping itself up in a ball of hydrogen gas. Black holes like this are usually found at the center of galaxies, sometimes millions or even billions of times more massive than our sun. Their gravity is so strong that matter falling in gets converted to energy producing enormous amounts of light. The discovery of the cliff and similar objects shows that these black hole stars might be the baby version of the super massive black holes we see at the centers of galaxies today. Yep.

Astronomers might be witnessing the universe's most powerful monsters as babies before they grew into the huge giants we know. The James Web has already spotted signs of big black holes in the early universe. And these black hole stars might explain how the universe grew so fast. You can think of them as turbocharged space builders, sucking in matter, getting bigger, and powering up the early cosmos. The scientists plan to study them more to see how dense their gas is and how strong they really are. As for the little red dots, they're super far away, both in space and in time. And they're so tiny that studying

them is tricky. But for now, the black hole star idea is the best explanation, fitting just about all the data. Researchers are working to figure out the rest. And even if some guesses turn out to be wrong, astronomers will just follow the clues and the next idea is bound to pop up. Now, scientists have a wild theory. What if our entire universe is actually inside a black hole? This is called the black hole cosmology. Some scientists have the idea that our observable universe and everything we see around us might be tucked inside a black hole which exists inside another parent universe or even multiverse and then this multiverse could be part of a bigger one and so on. Kind of like a stacking doll. Sounds like pure science

fiction but this is based on some curious facts. When scientists create the timeline of our world, they say that everything started from a singularity. If you kept squeezing a giant ball smaller and smaller, at some point it would get super dense before it crushed. Well, it's hard to imagine, but in space it's possible to squeeze a crazy amount of mass into a teeny tiny point. This point is called a singularity. The matter gets crushed into an infinitely small space less than an atom and it holds all the same mass of everything. Well, taking basically no volume. Inside this singularity point, things get so intense that the normal rules of physics just stop working. Everything we

know, time, space, matter breaks down and can't be applied anymore. Basically, what happens from now on is beyond our understanding. So scientists say that this was the starting point of our world when the big bang happened. It's like this tiny dot with everything inside it expanded to everywhere. This started forming the universe as we know it. And here's the thing. Scientists assume that singularity also exists deep within black holes. General relativity says that a black hole is born when something really big, like a huge star, collapses under its own weight. Gravity gets stronger the bigger the mass is. With a mass of a huge star tens of times bigger than

our sun, this tiny point would have an unbelievable gravity. It's why it starts sucking in all the stuff around it and curves the fabric of spaceime so much. It looks like a hole in space. And this would be the center of a black hole. It's a dot where all these things fall into and get crushed into an infinitely dense point. So, could our universe itself be just a little singularity dot inside a huge black hole inside of another universe? Well, that would be wild. So, it's not that easy to compress something so much that it literally warps spaceime. You need to squeeze it like crazy. If you wanted to make a small black hole like a human size, you'd need to shrink them down to the size of an

atomic nucleus. If you want a black hole the size of a chickpea, you'd have to compress our entire planet to that. But our universe is 99% empty space. There are trillions of miles of just nothingness between the stars. If you were to pack all the matter in the universe together, the result would be surprisingly small. Everything around us, including galaxies, stars, planets, and dust, would only fill about 1 billion cubic lightyear. It would be a cube about a thousand lighty years on each side. For comparison, our Milky Way alone is 100,000 lighty years in size. That's how sparse the universe is. But at this density, it would also be very, very massive. The resulting

mass would likely collapse into a black hole. And here's the wildest part. The resulting black hole would be roughly the same size as the universe itself. It would also have the same mass and energy as well as the same average density. The size or radius of the black hole grows together with its mass. The more stuff it eats, the bigger it is. But the density works the other way around. The black hole gets less dense as it grows. For a size that big of our entire world, it would be pretty sparse as well. And it's not the only coincidence. We have this thing called the Hubble radius, also known as the cosmological event horizon. If we imagine our observable universe as a giant bubble, then think of its edge like the farthest

part of the universe we can see. When you stand in a field and look around trying to see as far as you can, your eyes will draw a circle. This is like that. There might be more beyond that point, but we'll never know. Beyond this horizon, the light from distant parts of the universe will never reach us. That's because light travels at a certain speed and the space between us and those regions is expanding too quickly. It's like running towards something while super strong winds try to blow you away. Until we stay on Earth, we're cut off from those far-off corners forever. The black holes have something eerily similar called an event horizon or the Schwarzild radius. This is the point of

no return. This is the imaginary line that's often depicted as a light contour around the black holes. Anything crossing an event horizon, falling inside, is lost forever. No light, no matter, no information can escape from there. Black holes gravity is way too strong. So, they're perfect space vacuum cleaners. And as we mentioned before, if we create a black hole the size of the universe, they would have the same mass and the same event horizon radius. Now, while some scientists think this could just be random coincidences, others believe it's a clue that our universe might actually be inside a black hole.

The theory also suggests that our universe might not be the only one. It could exist in one of many black holes scattered throughout a large multiverse. In this crazy model, each one of them, both in our world and our parent world, could lead to its own universe with its own set of physical laws and structures. Now, that would be some weird chain. There's this theory that says that universes could be born inside of black holes, sort of. It's called the Einstein carton theory. This idea talks about singularity as well but in a different way. It says that instead of collapsing into an infinitely dense dot the matter might create a wormhole. This is like a tunnel through space and time.

This wormhole also known as an Einstein Rosen bridge could connect two different places of our universe. In that case one side of the tunnel is the black hole and on the other side there would be a whole new universe forming. So, it could work like a teleport. As soon as you pass the event horizon, you travel to the new world. But in that case, there should be an exit. Some scientists made it up and called it a white hole. It doesn't literally exist, not as far as we know, but it could be possible somewhere on the other side. It would serve as an exit of a wormhole, an area where matter is always ejected instead of pulled in. So, it's like you can't throw anything in there. it

would get expelled immediately. It's all purely hypothetical. Of course, all this stuff fits well into the concept of the big bounce. This idea says that instead of our universe beginning with a singular big bang, it bounced from a previous state of collapse. Remember the squeezed ball analogy? Well, maybe there used to be another universe ball that got super compressed to a minimum size before rebounding and expanding again. So instead of a universe born from nothing, we might live in one that's a cosmic recycling of another. There's also another version of this theory sometimes called shockwave cosmology. The idea says that the big bang could have been caused by a boom inside a black hole and this could create the expanding universe we

see today. As the universe expands and the matter density decreases, the black hole would eventually transform into a white hole, the reverse of a black hole, where matter is expelled instead of pulled in. But even though we have all these interesting connections, they're not evidence. There are no experiments or observations that could prove or disprove these wild theories. So, they all remain speculation for now. But at least it's fun to speculate. That's it for today. So hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends. Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the bright