You can read the original article on the NASA web site. In a nutshell, however, a team of astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA have found this:
This, of course, is an artist's interpretation of a gamma ray-emitting structure that extends 25,000 light years above and below the galactic core of the Milky Way. A bubble that emits much more energetic gamma rays than have been seen anywhere else in the Milky Way, and that appears to have well-defined edges and seems to have been formed "...as a result of a large and relatively rapid energy release - the source of which remains a mystery."
What is it? Well, that's the better question. There are no answers yet, because this is a fairly new discovery.
One possibility includes a particle jet from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. In many other galaxies, astronomers see fast particle jets powered by matter falling toward a central black hole. While there is no evidence the Milky Way's black hole has such a jet today, it may have in the past. The bubbles also may have formed as a result of gas outflows from a burst of star formation, perhaps the one that produced many massive star clusters in the Milky Way's center several million years ago.
"In other galaxies, we see that starbursts can drive enormous gas outflows," said David Spergel, a scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. "Whatever the energy source behind these huge bubbles may be, it is connected to many deep questions in astrophysics."
As J. B. S. Haldane put it, "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
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