See the complexity at the heart of the Milky Way in a new image

Chemistry at the heart of the Milky Way has never looked so beautiful

By Claire Cameron edited by Jeanna Bryner

At the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, there is beauty in chaos. Dense clouds of dust and spinning filaments of cold molecular gas, the basic stuff from which stars form, surround the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. And now a new image reveals that beauty in unprecedented detail.

Taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the image shows our galaxy as a “place of extremes, invisible to our eyes but now revealed in extraordinary detail,” Ashley Barnes, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Germany, said in a statement.

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The image captures an area more than 650 light-years across in what is known as the central molecular zone (CMZ). Inside lurk gas structures that span dozens of light years and the smaller clouds that surround stars. Astronomers are particularly interested in the zone’s chemistry because the gas is added to the matter from which stars grow.

Studying this region of the Milky Way could provide clues about how galaxies like ours formed, Steve Longmore, an astrophysicist at Liverpool John Moores University in England, said in the same statement. “We think the region shares many features with galaxies in the early universe, where stars formed in chaotic, extreme environments,” added Longmore, who is also part of the team that captured the new observations.

The image, which is the largest ever taken by ALMA, is part of the ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey. The new data were described in several articles posted on the preprint server arXiv.org and accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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