But how this forest of filaments forms near the galactic center is still unclear because there’s no obvious reason why these particles should be moving so fast without apparently streaming out from a powerful source, such as Sgr A*. But then it showed up at multiple wavelengths, and then other people actually found it also, so it was certainly a real structure.Įditor’s Note: Yusef-Zadeh explains that these long, vertical filaments turned out to be made of synchrotron radiation, which is produced by particles moving at nearly the speed of light through a magnetic field.
There were some discussions that maybe this is an artifact of imaging that we had done early on. You’re finding something very odd, so you’ve got to be super careful whether it is real or not. It was early on in the commissioning of the Very Large Array of radio telescopes.
We weren’t really looking for this kind of structure. That’s where you find these things-not in places that are more mundane.Ĭan you take us back to your initial discovery of vertical filaments in this region in the 1980s? When you have unusual, extraordinary places, you also find very unusual structures. It’s really the metropolis of the galaxy. You see all kinds of weird structures, unusual ones-we still don’t understand many of them. The galactic center is a very rich environment because there is already a supermassive black hole there, and it’s got about four million times the mass of the sun. What’s our current understanding of the environment at the center of the galaxy? Scientific American spoke with Yusef-Zadeh about these strange filaments and how they may have formed. And this month Yusef-Zadeh and his colleagues published new research in the Astrophysical Journal Letters showing the Milky Way’s heart unexpectedly hosts a second type of filament, too-so-called horizontal filaments, which are shorter and run parallel, rather than perpendicular, to the galactic plane. In the 1980s he and his colleagues discovered the first known filaments-streaks of superfast particles that stretch vertically through the galactic plane for more than 100 light-years and remain unexplained. The person most likely to answer them may be Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, who has been studying the galactic center for decades. What exactly are the filaments? How did they come to be? And what do they tell us about the Milky Way’s heart? As of yet, these are all open questions. Amid the millions of young, hot stars zipping around galactic center, astronomers have also spied a tangle of curious filamentlike structures stretching out for light-years. It’s a bustling, star-packed region that also harbors our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, which scientists call Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*. Strange things are afoot in the mysterious heart of the Milky Way.
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