JMCx4
Censorship is the Sincerest Form of Flattery
From: AAAS EurekaAlert!
Unidimensional art project in space.
NEWS RELEASE 2-JUN-2023
Mysterious dashes revealed in Milky Way’s center
Hundreds of horizontal filaments point toward our central supermassive black hole
Peer-Reviewed Publication
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
IMAGE: MEERKAT IMAGE OF THE GALACTIC CENTER WITH COLOR-CODED POSITION ANGLES OF ALL FILAMENTS. view more
CREDIT: FARHAD YUSEF-ZADEH/NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
• New radio telescope images reveal hundreds of filaments along the galactic plane, each measuring 5 to 10 light-years in length
• These structures likely originated a few million years ago when outflow from our supermassive black hole interacted with surrounding materials
• Researcher: ‘I was actually stunned when I saw these’
EVANSTON, Ill. — An international team of astrophysicists has discovered something wholly new, hidden in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
In the early 1980s, Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh discovered gigantic, one-dimensional filaments dangling vertically near Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. Now, Yusef-Zadeh and his collaborators have discovered a new population of filaments — but these threads are much shorter and lie horizontally or radially, spreading out like spokes on a wheel from the black hole.
Although the two populations of filaments share several similarities, Yusef-Zadeh assumes they have different origins. While the vertical filaments sweep through the galaxy, towering up to 150 light-years high, the horizontal filaments look more like the dots and dashes of Morse code, punctuating only one side of Sagittarius A*.
The study [was] published on Friday (June 2) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole,” Yusef-Zadeh said. “I was actually stunned when I saw these. We had to do a lot of work to establish that we weren’t fooling ourselves. And we found that these filaments are not random but appear to be tied to the outflow of our black hole. By studying them, we could learn more about the black hole’s spin and accretion disk orientation. It is satisfying when one finds order in a middle of a chaotic field of the nucleus of our galaxy.” ...
Unidimensional art project in space.
