An international team of astrophysicists has discovered a new population of filaments in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The threads are much shorter and lie horizontally or radially, spreading out like spokes on a wheel from the black hole. The vertical filaments are perpendicular to the galactic plane; the horizontal filaments are parallel to the plane but point radially toward the center of the galaxy where the black hole lies. The vertical filaments are magnetic and relativistic; the horizontal filaments appear to emit thermal radiation. The vertical filaments encompass particles moving at speeds near the speed of light; the horizontal filaments appear to accelerate thermal material in a molecular cloud. The new discovery may come as a surprise, but Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh is no stranger to uncovering mysteries at the center of our galaxy, located 25,000 light-years from Earth. The latest study builds on four decades of his research. After first discovering the vertical filaments in 1984 with Mark Morris and Don Chance, Yusef-Zadeh along with Ian Heywood and their collaborators later uncovered two gigantic radio-emitting bubbles near Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole.
