An international team of scientists has discovered hundreds of mysterious structures in the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. According to The Guardian, these ‘cosmic threads’ point towards the supermassive black hole. Each of these filaments stretches about five to 10 light years and appears like dots and dashes of Morse code on a vast scale, the outlet further said. A study detailing the discovery of these elongated bodies of luminous gas has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
These structures are located 2,500 light years away from Earth. Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, the lead author and an astronomer at Northwestern University in Illinois’ Evanston, said he was “stunned” by the discovery.
“They all seem to trace back to the black hole. They are telling us something about the activity of the black hole itself,” he told The Guardian. The data was captured by South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s MeerKAT radio telescope. It is the most sensitive radio telescope in the world and captured the images of the threads during an unprecedented 200-hour survey of the galactic core.
“The new MeerKAT observations have been a game changer,” Mr Yusef-Zadeh. “It’s really a technical achievement from radio astronomers.” CNN said the findings come 40 years after Mr Yusef-Zadeh discovered another population of nearly 1,000 one-dimensional filaments.
The findings about the black hole located about 26,000 light-years from Earth are “really exciting” and “demonstrate how beautiful the universe is,” said Erika Hamden, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. She was not involved in the study.
The vertical filaments are located perpendicular to the galactic plane, while the horizontal ones are parallel to the plane and point radially toward the black hole, according to the news release. The vertical filaments surround the nucleus of the Milky Way, but the horizontal ones appear to spread out to one side toward the black hole.