Swirling through the Milky Way’s central zone, surrounding the supermassive black hole Sgr A*, dust and gases constantly churn as energetic shock waves ripple. An international scientific team using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has sharpened our view of this action by a factor of 100, discovering a surprising new filamentary structure in this mysterious region of space. Using ALMA’s high resolution and sensitivity to map distinct spectral lines within the molecular clouds at the center of the Milky Way, the team led by Kai Yang/Shanghai Jiao Tong University has delineated a new type of long, narrow filamentary structure at a significantly finer scale. The results of this study are published in Astronomy & Astrophysics in the following article: Yang et al. “ALMA observations of massive clouds in the central molecular zone: slim filaments tracing parsec-scale shocks.”
Read here the ALMA press release and here the original press release published by the National Radioastronomy Observatory of United States (NRAO).
Image: © Yang et al.; Slim filaments in the CMZ. Panel a: MeerKAT 1.28 GHz radio emission of the Sgr A region. The red boxes mark the 20 km s−1 cloud and the 50 km s−1 cloud. Panels b–c: integrated intensity maps of SiO 5–4 in the 20 km s−1 cloud and the 50 km s−1 cloud from ALMA low-resolution (~1.9″) observations. The blue boxes mark zoom-in regions where slim filaments are detected. The dashed loops demonstrate the 50% primary beam of our ALMA high-resolution (~0.″23) observation. Panels d–g: SiO 5–4 emission of filaments from our ALMA high-resolution observations, which are integrated in velocity ranges of [−20, 40] and [25, 75] km s−1 for the 20 km s−1 cloud and the 50 km s−1 cloud respectively. The pink dashed lines illustrate the identified slim filaments. The black contours present the ALMA 1.3 mm continuum emission at levels of [5, 25, 45] × 40 µJy beam−1 .