Mark Megahan
Astronomers were recently astonished to discover our very own solar system sits at the end of a cosmic tunnel. Then they found another one. The first stretches out toward the constellation Centaurus. The other is a direct link to Canis Major.
Tunnel baffles experts
It’s not the long sought wormhole but experts are baffled to find a mysterious tunnel network. Our planetary system sits at one end of at least two tunnels.
That might be common or just a coincidence. Either way, they point in different directions.
Leading away from our parent star, Sol, one tunnel stretches out “toward the Centaurus constellation.”
That’s not one Americans are familiar with because it sits right above the southern cross. Astronomers were startled to discover it in data from the eRosita X-ray instrument.
Another thing the stargazers are still trying to get their head around is the medium through which the tunnel system burrows. A while back, they calculated that Sol and her 8 or 9 planets, depending on how you feel about Pluto, “exists in a Local Hot Bubble.”
We’re basically simmering in a soup of interstellar plasma. That structure is “estimated to be around 300 light-years across.”
Link to dog star
Once they started looking, astronomers soon noticed a second tunnel. This one reaches all the way to Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major.
Orion is easy to spot in the winter sky and the big dog lies just beside the hunter’s right leg. It would be nice if the cosmic void were a “shortcut” for travelers but astrophysicists aren’t getting their hopes up.
The important thing to today’s experts is the suggestion there “may be a larger network” of tunnels “between different star regions.”
Unlike “wormholes” ripping the fabric of space and time, the tunnel discovery indicates our local region of space is more like a giant Swiss cheese of plasma. Instead of spherical holes it contains tube-like tunnels.
While they may seem mysterious, scientists think they understand the basics. Each tunnel “may represent a kind of interstellar backroad, a path carved out by dynamic processes and influenced by the long-ago actions of exploding stars.”
Decades ago there was chatter “that the space around us could hold labyrinths of connected cavities.” It took instruments like eRosita to pin it down. “By showing tunnels and pockets filled with hot plasma, the findings confirm at least one piece of these older theories.“
