Scientists report that they have discovered hundreds of ancient and strange string-like structures emanating from the center of our galaxy, and extending horizontally through it. The discovery was published on June 2 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acd54b
Live Science reported that “each of these previously unknown ‘filaments’ measures between 5 and 10 light-years in length—thousands of times the distance between the Sun and Pluto—but is visible only in radio wavelengths, meaning the structures were likely created by bursts of high-energy particles that are invisible to the naked eye. When seen together, the hundreds of crackling filaments seem to point directly at our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, suggesting that they may be the unhealed scars of an ancient, high-energy black hole outburst that tore through the surrounding clouds of gas.”
The lead study author Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University in Illinois, according to Live Science, stated: “It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole.” At the center of the Milky Way is a black hole estimated to have more mass than 4 million suns, and is called Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A*). (https://www.livescience.com/space/black-holes/hundreds-of-ancient-invisible-structures-discovered-near-our-galaxys-center )
Previous research by the Yusef-Zadeh team revealed huge bubbles of energy extending 25,000 light-years above and below the plane of the Milky Way, also apparently driven by Sgr A*, and among them were about a thousand vertical strand-like filaments “like the strings of an immense harp.” The vertical filaments extended up to an estimated 150 light years high.
These filaments are in the radio wave frequency, so they cannot be seen by optical telescopes. The research team used “enhanced recent observations from the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s MeerKAT telescope—an array of 64 interlinked radio antennas in South Africa—and reduced the background noise of nearby energy sources. The resulting images showed that the newfound filaments are about as thin as the previously discovered forest of vertical filaments. However, these new strands of energy appear to radiate from only one side of Sgr A*, whereas the previously discovered filaments line up all across the galactic center.”
