The new leads are extraordinary. (Photo: Shutterstock/Bruce Rolfe)
Researchers have discovered new filaments in our galaxy. This is not the first time such threads have been found, but they are unusually arranged and much shorter than those previously known.
Scientist Farhad Yousefzadeh of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and his team have discovered hundreds of new filaments in the Milky Way. These are giant, one-dimensional filaments located in the center of our galaxy.
He reports the discovery in A Stady, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Scientists discovered the filaments themselves in the 1980s, but the unusual arrangement and length of the filaments is new.
All previously detected filaments are perpendicular to the galactic plane. The new filaments are horizontal and radially aligned to our galaxy’s Sagittarius A supermassive black hole. In addition, they are much shorter than previously known filaments: instead of 150 light-years across, the new filaments are only 5 to 10 light-years across.
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Youssef Zadeh says: Mirror. “It appears to be the result of the interaction of this emitted material with nearby objects.”
What exactly the threads are about, how they were formed, and what purpose they serve is still unknown at the moment. However, the researchers would like to continue to monitor the phenomenon and gather new insights.
To find the strange structures, the researchers used filtered MeerKAT images from the Radio Astronomy Observatory telescope in South Africa.
However, the newly discovered filaments aren’t the only amazing recent discovery in space. Just a few months ago, researchers detected a black hole passing through space along with a string of stars.
The black hole could have escaped from its host galaxy and is now almost on the run. At about 200,000 light-years across, it is much larger than the Milky Way. It remains unclear how exactly the black hole escaped from its galaxy.
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