The Milky Way Has Giant Bubbles at Its Center
Astronomers have found radio-emitting structures jutting out from our galaxy’s black hole.
by Marina Koren
Sep 21, 2019
4 minutes
Farhad Yusef-Zadeh was observing the center of the Milky Way galaxy in radio waves, looking for the presence of faint stars, when he saw it: a spindly structure giving off its own radio emissions. The filament-like feature was probably a glitch in the telescope, or something clouding the field of view, he decided. It shouldn’t be here, he thought, and stripped it out of his data.
But the mystery filament kept showing up, and soon Yusef-Zadeh found others. What the astronomer had mistaken for an imperfection turned out to be an entire population of cosmic structures at the heart of the galaxy.
More than 100 filaments have been
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