An international team of scientists has discovered hundreds of mysterious structures at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. These ‘cosmic filaments’ point towards a supermassive black hole. Each of these filaments stretches about five to 10 light-years and looks like the dots and dashes of Morse code on a huge scale, the output further said.
A study detailing the discovery of these elongated bodies of glowing gas was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
These structures are located 2,500 light years from Earth
Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, lead author and an astronomer at Northwestern University in Illinois’ Evanston, said he was “amazed” by the discovery. “They all seem to trace back to the black hole. They tell us something about the activity of the black hole itself,” he said.
The data was captured by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s MeerKAT radio telescope. It is the world’s most sensitive radio telescope and captured images of the filaments during an unprecedented 200-hour survey of the galactic core.
“The new MeerKAT observations are a game changer,” Mr. Yusef-Zadeh. “It is truly a technical achievement for radio astronomers.” The findings come 40 years after Mr Yusef-Zadeh discovered another population of nearly 1,000 one-dimensional filaments.
The findings about the black hole, located about 26,000 light-years from Earth, are “really exciting” and “show how beautiful the universe is,” said Erika Hamden, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. She was not involved in the study.
The vertical filaments are located perpendicular to the galactic plane, while the horizontal ones are parallel to the plane and point radially toward the black hole, according to the press release. Vertical filaments surround the Milky Way’s core, but horizontal filaments appear to extend to one side toward the black hole.
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