Astronomers reveal new image of candy cane-shaped feature in the center of our galaxy – UCLA Newsroom

A team of astronomers has produced a new image of an arc-shaped object in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The feature, which resembles a candy cane, is a magnetic structure that covers an enormous region of some 160 light-years. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year almost 6 trillion miles.

Mark Morris, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a member of the research team, discovered the structure, also called the radio arc,with a former student, Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, back in 1983, but they did not have such a complete and colorful image of it then.

The new image shows the inner part of our galaxy, which houses the largest, densest collection of giant molecular clouds in the Milky Way. These vast, cool clouds contain enough dense gas and dust to form tens of millions of stars like the sun, Morris said.

In the image, blue and greenish-blue features reveal cold dust in molecular clouds where star formation is still in its infancy. Yellow features reveal the presence of ionized gas and showwherehundreds of massive stars have recently formed. Red and orange regions show areas where high-energy electrons emit radiation by a process called synchrotron emission, such as in theradio arcand Sagittarius A, the bright source at thegalaxys center that hosts its supermassive black hole.

Many of the universes secrets are being revealed through theparts of the electromagnetic spectrum of light that are not visible to the human eye. The electromagnetic spectrum encompasses the complete range of light seen and unseen from gamma rays, X-rays and ultraviolet light on one end to infrared and radio waves on the other. In the middle is the small visible spectrum that includes the colors humans can detect with the unaided eye. Gamma rays have wavelengths billions of times smaller than those of visible light, while radio waves have wavelengths billions of times longer than those of visible light. Astronomers use the entire electromagnetic spectrum. In the study that led to the new image, the research team observed radio waves with a wavelength of 2 millimeters.

The candy cane is a magnetic feature in which we can literally see the magnetic field lines illuminated by the radio emission, Morris said. The new result revealed by this image is that one of the filaments is inferred to contain extremely high-energy electrons, the origin of which remains an interesting and unsettled issue.

The candy cane arc is part of a set of radio-emitting filaments extending 160 light-years. It ismore than 100 light-years away from the central supermassive black hole. However, inanother study recently, Morris and colleagues saw similar magnetic radio filaments that they believe are connected to the supermassive black hole, which may lead to important new ways to study black holes, he said.

To produce the new image, the astronomers used a NASA 2-millimeter camera instrument called GISMO, along with a 30-meter radio telescope located at Pico Veleta, Spain. They also took archival observations from the European Space AgencysHerschel satelliteto model the infrared glow of cold dust. They added infrared data from theSCUBA-2instrument at theJames Clerk Maxwell Telescopenear the summit of Maunakea, Hawaii, and radio observations from the National Science FoundationsVery Large Array, located near Socorro, New Mexico.

The teams research describing the composite image was published last month in Astrophysical Journal.

Morris research interests include the center of the Milky Way, star formation, massive stellar clusters, and red giant stars, which are dying stars in the last stages of stellar evolution.

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Astronomers reveal new image of candy cane-shaped feature in the center of our galaxy - UCLA Newsroom