A new mosaic persona taken by the MeerKAT tuner telescope in South Africa has reveal nearly 1,000 multi - light - yr - long negatron strands at the center of attention of the Milky Way . The strands are huge streak of cosmic ray particles ; though they were key out nearly 40 years ago , researchers never knew there were so many .
The MeerKAT array is just part of the monolithic Square Kilometer Array , which studies astronomical evolution and cosmic magnetism , among other thing . The recent icon — incorporate 20 separate reflection in the radio wavelengths and totaling 144 hours — revealed 10 times more filaments than had been known antecedently . The squad ’s inquiry iscurrently hostedon the preprint server arXiv and has been take on for issue in the Astrophysical Journal Letters .
“ We have studied single filaments for a long prison term with a myopic horizon , ” allege Farhad Yusef - Zadeh , an astrophysicist at Northwestern University and the newspaper ’s confidential information author , in a universityrelease . “ Now , we finally see the big picture — a bird’s-eye opinion fill with an teemingness of filament . ”
A spectral image of the Milky Way’s center. The long vertical streaks are the magnetic filaments.Image:Northwestern University/SAORO/Oxford University
gird with the new picture of the strand , a mathematical group of astrophysicist of late conducted universe studies of the huge one - dimensional structures , which stretch up to 150 idle - yr long and are compose of electron that are interact with a magnetic field . The social structure seem in distich or in minuscule groups , making them look like monolithic scratch marker stretched across the marrow of the extragalactic nebula .
The origin of the filaments remains unknown , but seeing a bunch of the structure at once has helped the team narrow down their list of suspects . Variations in the radiation breathe by the filaments have head the squad to resolve that the strands are likely relate to flare-up from the supermassive sinister hollow at the Milky Way ’s nerve center , Sagittarius A * , rather than the production of supernovae , or the volatile deaths of stars .
Yusef - Zadeh told Gizmodo in an email that action from Sagittarius A * could have shaped the cosmic rays into magnetic tails . The billet could be “ similar to cometic tails when solar malarkey interact with a comet or a planet , ” he allege .
Going ahead , the team plans to elaborate the region they keep an eye on , in hopes of finding more information about the filaments and their bloodline . In concert with imaging from other observatories , like the forthcoming Rubin Observatory in Chile , the finding could help excuse what sort of prank cause these phenomena at the eye of galaxies .
More : The World ’s Largest Digital Camera Is Almost quick to Look Back in Time
AstronomyMilky WayPhysical sciencesSagittarius A
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