The Milky Way visible to the naked eye from Earth. Using radio telescopes, different celestial structures can be seen in different light wavelength ranges. (Shutterstock)
[The Epoch Times, June 9, 2023](The Epoch Times reporter Linda compiles and reports) After comprehensive observation of the Milky Way, astronomers have discovered hundreds of mysterious cosmic threads pointing to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Each of these strange threads stretches 5 to 10 light-years in space, forming “points” and “lines” like morse code on a cosmic level.
Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, an astronomer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said the filaments in data collected by the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa’s Northern Cape province surprised him. “Shock”. They spread outward from the center of the Milky Way, 25,000 light-years from Earth, like splintered spokes on a gigantic wheel.
MeerKAT, the world’s most sensitive radio telescope, captured images of these filaments during an unprecedented 200-hour sweep of observations of the Milky Way’s core. “They all seem to be traceable to the black hole (at the center of the galaxy) and they tell us a story about that black hole,” Zade told the Guardian.
Forty years ago, after analyzing data collected by a telescope in New Mexico called the Very Large Array, Zade had discovered some even longer filament structures around the constellation Sagittarius at the center of the Milky Way. The A* black hole (SgrA*), and perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way’s disk, is 150 light-years long.
What creates the numerous vertical filaments is unclear, but research has found that they possess powerful magnetic fields and emit radio waves as they accelerate particles in cosmic rays to nearly the speed of light.
Zade says researchers, including himself, have been so busy studying the properties of this giant vertical filament that they have barely noticed the presence of some shorter horizontal filaments that trace their origins to the center of the Milky Way.
“Previous research focused on how to understand the vertical filaments, and the horizontal structure was somehow ignored,” Zade said. “It really surprised me when I suddenly found these new structures pointing in the direction of the black hole.”
“These structures would not have been discovered had it not been for the MeerKAT telescope,” he adds. “We haven’t spent a lot of time working on the center of the galaxy.”
When scientists removed background and filtered out noise from the MeerKAT image, shorter horizontal filaments that spread out from the center of the Milky Way came into focus. Zade said his research team published June 2 in the journalAstrophysical Journal Letters(The Astrophysical Journal Letters), the new filament structure described in the paper, the formation process is different from the previous larger vertical filaments.
He suspects that an ejection of material from the black hole hit surrounding stars and gas clouds about 6 million years ago, creating streaks of hot plasma pointing toward the black hole. The effect is similar to blowing a few drops of oil paint across a canvas with a hair dryer.
“A black hole’s eruption interacts with the objects it encounters and distorts its shape, blowing everything in the same direction.”
By studying cosmic filaments, astronomers hope to learn more about the spin of the Milky Way’s central black hole and the accretion disk of matter that orbits it and falls into it.
“These won’t be the last pictures of the center of the Milky Way,” Zade said. “The Milky Way has many structures that we cannot explain, and there are still many things to explore.” ◇#
Editor in charge: Ye Ziwei
