1,000 odd threads are revealed at the centre of the Milky Way.

 1,000 weird threads dangling in space mysteriously. Some of the strands have been characterised as "like the strings on a harp." In other words, they appear in pairs and clusters, side by side with equal spacing. 

1,000 mysterious threads!

Perhaps you noticed last week's mosaic depiction of our Milky Way galaxy's centre. The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) will publish it on January 26, 2022. The image, which took more than three years to generate, showed the Milky Way's centre as we'd never seen it before. The presence of a population of unknown strands in the core of the Milky Way was one of the most intriguing aspects of the discovery.

Northwestern University has provided additional information about these odd strands. An astronomer there discovered them in the 1980s. The new picture, however, suggests that the strands have a much greater population than previously thought. Some can span up to 150 light-years. The new SARAO image shows them to be well-organized. They emerge in clusters and pairs, sometimes crisscrossing and bending, with some equally spaced out "like strings on a harp." What are they exactly?

We have no idea, of course. Astronomers never expected to find these threads, and we've never seen so many of them in such detail. The researchers ruled out supernovae as the origin of the strange magnetic filaments. They believe these magnetic filaments have something to do with our galaxy's 4-million-solar-mass black hole. They could also be linked to the huge radio-wave producing bubbles discovered at Northwestern in September 2019. They suspect the strands are made up of the following elements:

... cosmic ray electrons gyrating at near-light speed in the magnetic field.

However, that is simply a wild guess. The strands' origin is uncertain.

A new study on them is now available online, and The Astrophysical Journal Letters has published it.

It was found in 1984.

The first strands were discovered in 1984 by Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, an astronomer at Northwestern University. He stated in a statement, "We have studied individual filaments for a long time from a myopic [shortsighted or nearsighted] perspective." Examining just a few strands makes it difficult to get any firm conclusions about what they are and where they came from.

We can finally see the big picture - a panoramic vision filled with filaments. This marks a turning point in our understanding of these structures.

This is the first time we've been able to investigate the statistical properties of the filaments. We can learn more about the qualities of these odd sources by studying statistics.

If you were from another planet and saw one really tall individual on Earth, you could believe that everyone is tall. However, if you do statistics on a population, you can determine the average height.

That is precisely what we are doing. We can determine the strength of magnetic fields, their lengths, their orientations, and the radiation spectrum.