“We found that these filaments are not random but appear to be tied to the outflow of our black hole. We had to do a lot of work to establish that we weren’t fooling ourselves,” added Yusef-Zadeh, who’s also a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics. “I was actually stunned when I saw these. The new study both reinforces and builds upon the earlier findings.įinding the “new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole” was a surprise, Yusef-Zadeh, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, said in a news release. Yusef-Zadeh and collaborators also found hundreds more paired and clustered vertical filaments in the same area in 2022, realizing the filaments were likely related to Sagittarius A* activity rather than bursts of supernovae, which they had previously thought. The findings come nearly 40 years after Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, the study’s lead author, and other researchers discovered another population of nearly 1,000 one-dimensional filaments, which are vertical and much larger at up to 150 light-years long each, near the galaxy’s center. The filaments are relatively short in length, each measuring 5 to 10 light-years.

These one-dimensional cosmic threads are hundreds of horizontal or radial filaments - slender, elongated bodies of luminous gas that potentially originated a few million years ago when outflow from Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, interacted with surrounding materials, according to a study published Friday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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