Astronomers have discovered "tunnels" between stars, with the nearest leading to Proxima Centauri, where a mysterious radio signal was recently detected.
A tunnel or corridor made of hot gas leads from our Solar System towards the Centaurus constellation. Astronomers have long been studying strange "bubbles" of such gas: our Solar System is immersed in one of them. However, the discovery of "roads" in space is something new. This finding was made by a space X-ray telescope, and the article was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
HOT VOID
What’s our address in the tentacle? If you get lost in distant space, ask aliens to show you the Orion Arm. It is in this arm, broadly speaking, that the Solar System is located. From there, you can navigate.
The arms are star streams that swirl around the center of the Galaxy. Our Galaxy is spiral, and by observing other spiral galaxies, we can see that stars form like streams in a whirlpool (by the way, one spiral galaxy is actually named Whirlpool). We sit inside this spring flood and, of course, don't notice anything.
When astronomers started launching X-ray observatories into space (the atmosphere blocks X-ray radiation, making it impossible to study from Earth), it turned out that our arm is also bulged by some bubbles that glow in X-ray light.
The bubbles consist of extremely sparse but very hot gas. The temperature is around one million degrees, but there wouldn’t be even a single atom in one cubic centimeter of space (for comparison, there are about 2.68675×1019 molecules in one cubic centimeter of air; don’t complain that I’m not providing a numerical name, such names don’t exist). Inside the bubble, it is "emptier" than outside—about ten times so. As we can see, there are many types of vacuum; it's not just emptiness.
This means that interstellar space inside the bubbles is heated? Yes and no. If you were to fly through it, you wouldn't notice, as the gas is too sparse. The ship would be chilled, not scorched. Earth wasn't scorched either, and we're all immersed in it. But every single atom possesses exactly the energy that corresponds to a temperature of one million degrees. Accordingly, it glows—in the X-ray range. That’s what the telescopes see.
The Solar System has been traveling through a structure called the Local Bubble for about 10 million years (recently, by the way). Besides us, the constellation Canis Major is also immersed in it. The Local Bubble is adjacent to another one, which has the bright star Antares in Scorpius at its center. We are located right at the junction of these bubbles. And it is precisely here, at this junction, that we, the intelligent beings, emerged. Coincidence?
Who knows.
ROAD TO NEIGHBORS
But enough about the bubbles; the essence of the discovery is not in them but in the fact that the bubbles turned out to be not entirely bubbly. Not round.
This was revealed when astronomers tried to create a three-dimensional model of the part of the Galaxy where we have the honor to live.
- What we didn’t know was the existence of an interstellar tunnel to Centaurus, which cuts through a breach in the colder interstellar medium, — says German astronomer Michael Freyberg.
Now astronomers hypothesize that there is not just one such tunnel. Here, we found the one leading to the Centaurus constellation. But could it be that there is a system of tunnels connecting all stars? What if the Sun is connected to another star, that one to yet another, and thus all stars are interconnected?
- We suggest that the Centaurus tunnel may be merely a local example of a broader network of hot interstellar space, supported by stellar feedback throughout the Galaxy, - states the astronomers' official announcement.
This is hard to comprehend. Astronomers believe that the bubbles formed as a result of supernova explosions. Our local bubble was supposedly created by a star in the Gemini constellation that exploded about 14 million years ago (and only a pulsar remains from it, nothing more). So, the bubble is a shock wave that is still propagating from the explosion site.
Let’s accept that. But where do the tunnels come from? Astronomers had previously observed the asymmetry of the bubbles but thought it was due to them rotating with the Galaxy. They stretched. Tunnels don’t quite fit into this concept.
MYSTERIOUS MYSTERY
Intriguing? To say the least.
Here, we can take two paths (both will lead us into the realm of speculation, but that makes it all the more interesting).
The first path. We remember that inside the bubble, the vacuum is about ten times emptier than outside. At the same time, according to recent calculations, the resistance of the interstellar medium is the main obstacle to interstellar travel at very high speeds. If you fly almost at the speed of light, the vacuum will slow you down and destroy you, even though, by earthly standards, there’s essentially nothing in it.
This means that traveling inside the bubbles is ten times more convenient, allowing for speeds ten times greater? It seems so. And it turns out that such a "tunnel of emptiness" leads directly to the Centaurus constellation.
And how can we not recall that it was from there, specifically from the nearest star to us, Proxima (only 4 light-years away), that we received the BLC-1 signal in 2019, which remains the most mysterious of all we've heard in space. It closely resembles an artificial signal. Recently, a number of astronomers claimed they managed to decode it, and what they found is… it's even scary to reveal. Therefore, it is kept secret for now.
Let’s not delve into conspiracy theories, but the coincidence (yet another coincidence) is striking. It’s as if someone has paved a path for us directly to Proxima, signaling from there.
The second path. Let’s forget about aliens and move to an even more insane perspective. There are scientists (mostly philosophers, not physicists) who believe that the cosmos as a whole is intelligent, and every star is a brain. Despite the strangeness of this approach, nearly a hundred papers have been published discussing and proving it.
Then tunnels become a neural network connecting all stars in the Galaxy, and the stars themselves are more likely not "brains" but neurons. This is hinted at by the original discoverers of the tunnel in the aforementioned statement. Thus, the "brain" is our entire Galaxy.
When you look at the night sky, you see a black void and a few stars—especially in the city. Modern research methods reveal patterns and oddities that past prophets could only dream of. Just imagine what it will be like when we build a proper observatory on the Moon and observe from there.
We live in interesting times.