Center of the Milky Way

via Gizmodo

"You’re looking at the center of our galactic home, the Milky Way, as imaged by 64 radio telescopes in the South African wilderness.

Scientists released this image today to inaugurate the completed MeerKAT radio telescope. But these scopes form part of an even more ambitious project: the Square Kilometer Array, a joint effort to build the world’s largest telescope, spanning the continents of Africa and Australia.

This image shows filaments of particles, structures that seem to exist in alignment with the galaxy’s central black hole. It’s unclear what causes these filaments. Maybe they are particles ejected by the spinning black hole; maybe they are hypothesized “cosmic strings;” and maybe they’re not unique, and there are other, similar structures waiting to be found, according to a 2017 release from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

'This image from MeerKAT is awesome to me because the fine filaments seen in the radio image are excellent tracers of the galactic magnetic field, something we don’t get to see in most optical and infrared data,” Erin Ryan, principal investigator at the SETI Institute, told Gizmodo. “High-resolution data like this will help the study of galactic magnetic fields and how they may be important for galaxy evolution.'"