Scientists discover mysterious cosmic threads in Milky Way

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Astronomers have discovered hundreds of mysterious cosmic threads that point towards the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, after a survey of the galaxy.

The strange filaments, each of which stretches five to 10 light years through space, resemble the dots and dashes of morse code on a vast scale. They spread out from the galactic centre 25,000 light years from Earth like fragmented spokes on an enormous wheel.

Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, an astronomer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said he was “stunned” to discover the structures in data taken by the MeerKAT radio telescope in the Northern Cape of South Africa.

The observatory, the most sensitive radio telescope in the world, captured images of the threads during an unprecedented 200-hour survey of the galactic core. Yusef-Zadeh told the Guardian: “They all seem to trace back to the black hole. They are telling us something about the activity of the black hole itself.”

Read more on the guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jun/02/scientists-discover-mysterious-cosmic-threads-in-milky-way

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