These mysterious structures likely originated a few million years ago when an outflow from Sagittarius A* — a supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way Galaxy — interacted with surrounding material.
“It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole,” said Northwestern University astronomer Farhad Yusef-Zadeh.
“I was actually stunned when I saw these. We had to do a lot of work to establish that we weren’t fooling ourselves.”
“And we found that these filaments are not random but appear to be tied to the outflow of our black hole.”
“By studying them, we could learn more about the black hole’s spin and accretion disk orientation.”
“It is satisfying when one finds order in a middle of a chaotic field of the nucleus of our Galaxy.”
In the 1980s, Professor Yusef-Zadeh and colleagues discovered gigantic, one-dimensional filaments dangling vertically near Sagittarius A*.
They also uncovered two gigantic radio-emitting bubbles near the supermassive black hole.
Then, they revealed nearly 1,000 vertical filaments, which appeared in pairs and clusters, often stacked equally spaced or side by side like strings on a harp.
After studying the vertical filaments for decades, Professor Yusef-Zadeh was shocked to uncover their horizontal counterparts, which he estimates are about 6 million years old.
“We have always been thinking about vertical filaments and their origin. I’m used to them being vertical. I never considered there might be others along the plane,” he said.
To pinpoint the filaments, the astronomers used a technique to remove the background and smooth the noise from the images, captured by the MeerKAT telescope at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) in Cape Town, South Africa, in order to isolate the filaments from surrounding structures.
“The new MeerKAT observations have been a game changer,” Professor Yusef-Zadeh…
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