Around 25 000 light-years away, high-energy particles are moving near the speed of light in large vertical magnetized threads perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way. The particles are likely still zipping around inside them today. Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh and his colleagues first discovered the filament-like structures near Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the black hole at the center of our galaxy, almost 40 years ago. As of 2022, about 1000 filaments stretching roughly 150 light-years have been counted. Now, through a MeerKAT radio telescope survey of the galactic center, Yusef-Zadeh and other researchers have found, to their surprise, what they suspect to be a few hundred horizontal filaments 5– 10 light-years in length that are pointing radially toward Sgr A* and parallel to the galactic plane.
To make this image, Yusef-Zadeh and his colleagues filtered the original MeerKAT image to smooth the background noise, and then they applied...
