Astrophysicists Found 1,000 Magnetic Milky Way ‘Strands’

A brand new mosaic picture taken by the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa has revealed almost 1,000 multi-light-year-long electron strands on the heart of the Milky Way. The strands are enormous streaks of cosmic ray particles; although they have been found almost 40 years in the past, researchers by no means knew there have been so many.

The MeerKAT array is simply a part of the huge Square Kilometer Array, which research galactic evolution and cosmic magnetism, among other things. The current picture—comprising 20 separate observations within the radio wavelengths and totaling 144 hours—revealed 10 instances extra filaments than had been identified beforehand. The group’s analysis is currently hosted on the preprint server arXiv and has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“We have studied individual filaments for a long time with a myopic view,” stated Farhad Yusuf-Zadeh, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University and the paper’s lead creator, in a college release. “Now, we finally see the big picture — a panoramic view filled with an abundance of filaments.”

Armed with the brand new picture of the strands, a gaggle of astrophysicists just lately performed inhabitants research of the large one-dimensional constructions, which stretch as much as 150 light-years lengthy and are composed of electrons which can be interacting with a magnetic subject. The constructions seem in pairs or in small teams, making them appear like large scratch marks stretched throughout the middle of the galaxy.

The origin of the filaments stays unknown, however seeing a bunch of the constructions without delay has helped the group slender down their record of suspects. Variations within the radiation emitted by the filaments have led the group to conclude that the strands are probably associated to outbursts from the supermassive black gap on the Milky Way’s heart, Sagittarius A*, moderately than the product of supernovae, or the explosive deaths of stars.

Yusuf-Zadeh informed Gizmodo in an e mail that exercise from Sagittarius A* might have formed the cosmic rays into magnetized tails. The state of affairs may very well be “similar to cometary tails when solar winds interact with a comet or a planet,” he stated.

Going ahead, the group plans to broaden the area they observe, in hopes of discovering extra details about the filaments and their origin. In live performance with imagery from different observatories, just like the upcoming Rubin Observatory in Chile, the findings might assist clarify what kind of antics trigger these phenomena on the coronary heart of galaxies.

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