Astronomers have captured hundreds of mysterious filaments pointing toward the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. They could help uncover secrets about the dark abyss at the center of our galaxy.
The strange horizontal strands are 25,000 light years from Earth, with scientists comparing them to the dots and dashes of Morse code — only these appear to be floating through space!
“It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole,” says Professor Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University.
“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.
According to StudyFinds, 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,” continues Yusef-Zadeh, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, in a university release.
Known as Sagittarius A*, the black hole is a staggering four million times the mass of our Sun. Four decades ago, Prof. Yusef-Zadeh discovered nearby vertical threads, towering up to 150 light years high.
The new population are much shorter, measuring less than 10 light years in length and lying horizontally. The Morse code-like pattern punctuates only one side of Sagittarius A*.
Last year, the same team revealed nearly 1,000 vertical filaments, which appeared in pairs and clusters, often stacked equally spaced or side-by-side like strings on a harp.
The flood of new discoveries is coming from enhanced technology, particularly the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (SARAO) MeerKAT telescope. To pinpoint the filaments, the researchers used a technique to remove the background and smooth the noise from images to isolate them from surrounding structures.
“The new MeerKAT observations have been a game changer,” Yusef-Zadeh says. “The advancement of technology and dedicated observing time have given us new information. It’s really a technical achievement from radio astronomers.”
The Northwestern astronomer was shocked to uncover the horizontal counterparts, estimated to be about six million years-old.
“We have always been thinking about vertical filaments and their origin,” the study author adds. “I’m used to them being vertical. I never considered there might be others along the plane.”
