An international team of astronomers has announced the detection of hundreds of mysterious shapes in the center of the Milky Way, in a step closer to unlocking an additional mystery surrounding the universe.
According to a study published in the “Letters” magazine, which specializes in astrophysics, the hundreds of discovered objects are threads of “luminous gas”.
The study showed that these one-dimensional threads take a horizontal or radial shape, and they are light and stretchy.
Scientists believe that these objects emanated millions of years ago from the massive black hole of the Milky Way, which is known as “Sagittarius A”, and then interacted with its surroundings.
The researchers estimate that these filaments are relatively short, because the length of each filament ranges between 5 and 10 light years.
These discoveries come 40 years after the researcher, Farhad Yousefzadeh, who supervised this study, along with other scientists, was able to monitor about a thousand one-dimensional threads near the center of the galaxy.
The filaments discovered earlier are columnar in shape, and are larger at 150 light-years across.
The discovery of these filaments in the galaxy would provide an image of the direction of the black hole, according to researcher Zadeh, a researcher and professor of astrophysics at Northwestern University, USA.
The researcher expressed his amazement at the discovery, and said that scientists made a great effort to make sure that it was not just a hoax, and then “we found that it is not random, but rather related to what flows from our black hole.”
