2024-03-24 05:00:10
A NASA-funded team from Villanova University recently revealed a never-before-seen view of the central region of our Milky Way, revealing the magnetic fields and cold dust structures that reside there.
At the heart of our galaxy lies the Central Molecular Zone, a dense reservoir of dust reaching 60 million solar masses and displaying a temperature (Temperature is a physical quantity measured using a thermometer and…) touching -258.2 degrees Celsius. This dust is essential because it forms the foundations of stars, planets and, by extension, life as we know it. L’interaction (An interaction is an exchange of information, affects or energy between two agents within…) between magnetic fields and this dust is crucial to understanding not only the Milky Way (The Milky Way (also called “our galaxy”, or sometimes…)but also other galaxies.
Credit: Villanova University/Paré, Karpovich, Chuss (PI)
To unravel these mysteries, researchers used the SOFIA telescope, installed on board a Boeing 747 (The Boeing 747, also nicknamed Jumbo Jet, is an airliner designed by the aircraft manufacturer…) flying more than 13,700 meters above sea levelaltitude (Altitude is the vertical elevation of a place or object relative to a level…). Ce project (A project is an irreversible commitment with an uncertain result, not reproducible…)named FIREPLACE, resulted in the creation of a map infrared (Infrared radiation (IR) is electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength…) detailing approximately 500 light years in the center of our galaxy (A galaxy is, in cosmology, an assembly of stars, gas, dust and…). This map reveals a complex interaction between cold dust, visible in blue, and magnetic fields, indicated by filaments emitting radio waves in jaune (There are (at least) five definitions of yellow which designate approximately the same…).
This exploration made it possible to detect variations in theorientation (In the literal sense, the orientation designates or materializes the direction of the East (sunrise…) magnetic fields through the dust clouds, providing a first glimpse of their complex arrangement. The discovery is a significant step forward, although researchers admit that there is still a long way to go to fully decipher the mysteries of the Milky Way’s heart.
The collected data raises new questions about how magnetic fields interact with dust at large scale (The large ladder, also called aerial ladder or auto ladder, is a…) in the galaxy, offering clues about the potential link between magnetic fields observed at different scales. The researchers hope that this information will encourage theorists to propose new models to explain these complex dynamics.
A three-color view of the central molecular zone (CMZ) showing MeerKAT radio emission at 20 cm (1 GHz) in yellow (Heywood et al., 2022) and cold dust emission at 250 µm and hot dust at 70 µm observed by Herschel in cyan and violet (Molinari et al., 2011). The green dotted box indicates approximately the region covered by the observations (Observation is the action of attentively following phenomena, without wanting to…) of FIREPLACE DR1 presented in Butterfield et al. (2023). The main molecular clouds of the CMZ are marked and identified.
The implications of this study go beyond our simple understanding of the Milky Way, opening windows into the fundamental processes that govern galaxy formation and evolution.
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