There’s been another unexpected discovery in our galaxy, after scientists observed strange structures pointing towards a black hole.
These “dashes” were spotted in the Milky Way and all aim towards the black hole at its centre.
The sheer number of these structures is unprecedented, too, with hundreds of them measuring five to 10 light-years long discovered as part of the new research.
The true nature of the dashes remains a mystery, and there’s currently no explanation as to how they got there in the first place.
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“It was a surprise to suddenly find a new population of structures that seem to be pointing in the direction of the black hole,” Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, who led the research.
“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.”
The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, also reflects on findings from Professor Yusef-Zadeh in the early 80s, who discovered one-dimensional filaments near the black hole in the middle of the Milky Way, named Sagittarius A*.
The new structures are spread out in a different direction, and change the way scientists have been thinking about filaments like this completely.
“We have always been thinking about vertical filaments and their origin,” he said. “I’m used to them being vertical. I never considered there might be others along the plane.”
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