The new radio telescope images revealed hundreds of filaments along the Milky Way’s galactic plane.
Recent discoveries of previously unexplained structures in the center of the Milky Way have stunned astrophysicists. New radio telescope images revealed hundreds of filaments along the galactic plane, believed to have originated only a few million years ago, as a result a an outflow from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our very own Milky Way galaxy, that interacted with surrounding materials.
The new discovery by an international team of astrophysicists goes hand in hand with a discovery some 40 years ago by Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadah, who is also the lead author of the current study. In the 1980s, Yusef-Zadah, an expert in radio astronomy and professor of physics and astronomy, discovered immense, one-dimensional filaments hanging vertically near Sagittarius A*. The discovery is of a new population of filaments, however, that are much shorter and lie horizontally, or radially. These radial filaments are believed to be only about 5 to 10 light-years across.
