Space, to the naked eye, appears still, tranquil. But to scientists viewing it through increasingly powerful telescopes, it looks turbulent, with violent streams of gas buffeting dusty materials that form fascinating shapes, then disperse.
Now an international team of astronomers has employed the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to get a better view of this action. ALMA’s amazingly high resolution has sharpened the view of the tempestuous churn in Milky Way’s central zone.
This area, surrounding the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), acts as a kind of galactic mixing bowl, swirling gas and dust and emitting shock waves ripples. The astronomers observing this activity report a new structure in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics: long, thin filaments as an important byproduct of space material circulation.
