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Astronomers have been looking at our very own Milky Way galaxy with everything from the naked eye to the latest James Webb Telescope. An intense survey of the galactic core shows the familiar structures in ways we’ve never seen before.
Milky Way in new light
Using a whole bunch of networked radio telescopes called MeerKAT, astronomers just released images from a high-resolution radio survey 13 years in the making.
While we’ve viewed our own Milky Way galactic core in many wavelengths, we haven’t seen it all. When the full Square Kilometer Array comes online, the images will only get better.
Once they got all the data analyzed and the digital images created, “the first comprehensive, high-resolution radio map revealed unexpected, fantastical features.”
For instance, the mosaic of Milky Way data “shows the central region of the galactic plane in 1.28 GHz radio frequencies.” They expected that the galactic core would be the brightest “but the non-thermal radio filaments, as well as some newly discovered radio bubbles, still lack a comprehensive explanation.”
We can’t trust our eyes to see what’s going on with visible light all by itself because “our eyes cannot penetrate the light-blocking dust that intervenes.”
They finally put together a composite Milky Way image, “which combines X-ray, infrared, and optical light from NASA’s great observatories, was our best view of what’s going on in the galactic center.” Gamma rays “reveal pulsars and ancient supernovae.” X-rays, meanwhile, “reveal black holes and superheated matter.“
