Radio telescopes have captured the most in-depth images of hundreds of filaments that stretch through the center of our galaxy. These mysterious strings sometimes span more than 150 light years in length, occasionally grouped in patterns.
“Some of them are beautiful — they show up like harp-shaped strings next to each other,” says Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University who led a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on the strands.
But researchers are still unsure about the cause of these features in the cosmos. “The big question is: What is the origin of these filaments?” Yusef-Zadeh says. “The puzzle is still there and the mystery continues.”
