Look: 1,000 mysterious filaments discovered at the center of the Milky Way
Nearly 1,000 were spotted streaking through space.
That’s because dark clouds of dust and gas obscure our view from Earth. Even with advanced X-ray and radio telescopes, we’re still uncovering new surprises in our cosmic backyard.
Radio telescopes can capture especially ghostly views of the unexplored.
Even though researchers originally discovered these strange structures in the 1980s, they didn’t know just how many existed until now.
Researchers know that they’re magnetic. The filaments likely have something to do with past activity from Sagittarius A, our galaxy’s supermassive black hole.
But the filaments’ origin, movements, and makeup remain shrouded in mystery.
They could also possibly be linked to radio-emitting bubbles that sit at the Milky Way’s center.
The next step is to catalog each one, which Northwestern University researcher Farhad Yusef-Zadeh is working on.
He helped discover the filaments in the 1980s, and co-authored a new report about the structures that will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.