Scientists ‘stunned’ by mysterious ‘structures’ found in space
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: John Sirlin / Alamy/ Northwestern University
With the advancements in technology, we are learning more and more everyday about space and faraway galaxies.
Just this week, NASA released its initial findings from its study into UFOs.
And while the full findings wont be revealed until July, it has many space geeks excited.
The latest from NASA is not the only space revelation to come out in recent days, because an international team of astrophysicists have recently discovered something pretty incredible.
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It all started in the early 1980s when Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh discovered a 'gigantic' one-dimensional filaments dangling vertically near Sagittarius A* - our galaxy's central supermassive black hole.
But now, Yusef-Zadeh and his team have discovered hundreds of new, mysterious structures in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
As the team found more paired and clustered vertical filaments in the same area last year, it is believed they are related to Sagittarius A* activity.
While the two populations of filaments share several similarities, Yusef-Zadeh assumes they come from a different origin.
The vertical filaments are said to sweep through the galaxy towering up to 150 light-years high, with the horizontal fragments looking 'more like the dots and dashes of Morse code'.
"It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole," Yusef-Zadeh said.
He continued: "I was actually stunned when I saw these. We had to do a lot of work to establish that we weren’t fooling ourselves. And we found that these filaments are not random but appear to be tied to the outflow of our black hole.
"By studying them, we could learn more about the black hole’s spin and accretion disk orientation. It is satisfying when one finds order in a middle of a chaotic field of the nucleus of our galaxy."
While this study may be pretty groundbreaking, Yusef-Zadeh doesn't plan to stop there when it comes to his research - he has been doing it since the 1980s after all.
In fact, he thinks that further studying in this area could help them 'learn more about the black hole’s spin and accretion disk orientation'.
The accretion disk is a hot structure resulting from a star being pulled into a circle around the black hole.