Mystery of two Galactic mushroom clouds

[Eldorado]

When Peter Predehl, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, first laid eyes on the new map of the universe’s hottest objects, he immediately recognized the aftermath of a galactic catastrophe.

A bright-yellow cloud billowed tens of thousands of light-years upward from the Milky Way’s flat disk, with a fainter twin reflected below.

The structure was so obvious that it barely seemed necessary to describe it in writing. But “Nature wouldn’t accept [us] simply sending a picture and saying, ‘Okay, we can see this,’” Predehl says. “Therefore, we did some analysis.”

The results, which Nature published on December 9, have moved a decades-old idea from the fringe into the mainstream.

Full monty at The Atlantic: Link