The Radio Image Of The Milky Way.

This false-color image showshow the center of the Milky Way appears in radio light. Areas withthe strongest radio signals appearin red and orange.

This isn’t a trippy Eye of Sauron or a splatter of modern art. The image is actually a detailed view of the Milky Way’s chaotic center. But it’s not what you’d see with the human eye.

This picture took three years to make. The picture is a mosaic of 20 separate images taken over three years with a radio-telescope array in South Africa. The bright, stardense galactic plane runs from left to right across the image.

The center of the Milky Way in radio light.

A close-up from a new image of the Milky Way.

The panorama is 1000 light-years wide and 600 light-years high of the central regions of the Milky Way. The entire galaxy is 100000 light years in diameter, and its center is 25000 light-years from Earth.

Another close-up shows a cloud known as G359.1-0.5, the glowing remains of a supernova explosion. To its left, the Mouse, a runaway pulsar possibly formed and ejected by the supernova. To its right, a radio-wave-emitting filament known as the Snake.

The image, taken by the MeerKAT radio telescope, an array of 64 dishes-antennas, each 13.5m in diameter, spread across 8 kilometers of desert in northern South Africa, reveals a storm of activity in the central region of the Milky Way, with threads of radio emission laced and kinked through space among bubbles of energy. At the very center a well-studied supermassive black hole.

MeerKAT radio-telescope.

The Milky Way’s disc, where most of the stars and exoplanets reside, appears in the image as a ragged horizontal streak. A dense blob of energy in the middle of the streak marks the spot where lurks a black hole four million times as massive as our sun. The surrounding region is filled with mysterious glowing filaments as much as 100 light-years long.

The Milky Way.

Astronomers have surmised that such filaments, first recognized 35 years ago, are formed by magnetized tubes of gas and high-energy particles. But scientists still don’t understand how these arose.

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