Mysterious threads discovered in the Milky Way

A group of international scientists has discovered hundreds of so-called filaments in the Milky Way, which may be several million years old. These are one-dimensional cosmic threads of glowing gas, five to ten light-years across. The researchers suspect that they originate from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

The threads may have formed when Sagittarius A* spewed out matter, which then reacted with materials in the environment, according to the study, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

For the lead author, Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, this is not the first finding of such filaments. As early as 1984, he and his colleagues had found another cluster of nearly 1,000 filaments near the center of the Milky Way. However, at up to 150 light-years in length, these are considerably larger and arranged vertically rather than horizontally. At the time, however, it was still believed that they could have formed after supernovae outbursts.

The discovery of the new cluster of structures that appear to point toward the black hole came as a surprise, said Yusef-Zadeh, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, in a press release . “I was really surprised when I saw her. We had to put in a lot of work to realize that we weren’t kidding ourselves.”

The new results also indicate that the filaments are not random, but due to the black hole. “It’s satisfying to find order in the middle of a chaotic field in our galaxy,” says the study’s author.

Sagittarius A* is about 26,000 light-years from Earth, making it the closest supermassive black hole to us. Since it shows relatively little activity, it is considered difficult to study.

The researchers found the other cosmic threads by analyzing images from South Africa’s Radio Astronomy Observatory’s MeerKAT telescope. It has 64 satellite dishes in a sparsely populated area, each nearly 20 meters high.

(t-online, cho)