“These are not going to be the last images of the centre of the galaxy,” said Yusef-Zadeh. “It’s sufficient to blow everything in the same direction.”īy studying the cosmic threads, astronomers hope to understand more about the spin of the Milky Way’s central black hole and the accretion disc of infalling material that whirls around it. “The outflow from the black hole interacts with the objects it meets and distorts their shape,” Yusef-Zadeh said. The effect is akin to blowing blobs of paint across a canvas with a hairdryer. He suspects that an outburst of material from the black hole about 6m years ago slammed into surrounding stars and gas clouds, creating streaks of hot plasma that point back towards the black hole. Yusef-Zadeh believes the structures, described in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, formed through a different process to the larger, vertical filaments. The shorter, horizontal threads that spread out from the centre of the Milky Way came into focus when the scientists removed the background and filtered noise from the MeerKAT images. “We’ve never been able to dedicate that amount of time to the centre of the galaxy. “If it wasn’t for MeerKAT these wouldn’t have been detected,” he added. I was actually stunned when I saw these.” “It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole. The horizontal structures somehow didn’t register,” Yusef-Zadeh said. “The emphasis has been on understanding the vertical filaments. What produced the more numerous vertical filaments is still unclear, but studies have found that they possess strong magnetic fields and emit radio waves as they accelerate particles in cosmic rays to the verge of light speed.Īccording to Yusef-Zadeh, researchers – himself included – have been so busy grappling with the nature of the giant vertical threads that the existence of the shorter, horizontal filaments which trace back to the centre of the Milky Way almost went unnoticed. Those structures dangle perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way disc and measure 150 light years from top to bottom. They are telling us something about the activity of the black hole itself.”įour decades ago, Yusef-Zadeh found much larger, vertical filaments surrounding Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, in data gathered by another telescope called the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Yusef-Zadeh told the Guardian: “They all seem to trace back to the black hole. The observatory, the most sensitive radio telescope in the world, captured images of the threads during an unprecedented 200-hour survey of the galactic core. Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, an astronomer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said he was “stunned” to discover the structures in data taken by the MeerKAT radio telescope in the Northern Cape of South Africa.
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