Scientists have captured a beautiful image in unprecedented detail of the vast Milky Way galaxy, of which our own solar system is a part.
The stunning image is the largest ever obtained by the specialist telescope in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma) radio telescope, according to the group behind the project.
The picture not only serves to stir the public imagination of outer space but is also incredibly important for understanding our own origins as a planet, said Steven Longmore, the principal investigator and a professor of astrophysics at Liverpool John Moores University.
“The conditions at the center of our galaxy – the extreme temperatures, pressures, and turbulence – are very similar to the conditions in galaxies in the early universe, when most of the stars that exist today were being formed. Those galaxies are so far away that we cannot observe individual stars and planets forming within them, but we can in the center of our galaxy, and that’s what our survey has been able to do,” Longmore said. He has worked with more than 160 scientists over several years on a project called the Alma CMZ Exploration Survey.
Before capturing the latest image, scientists could only see small, isolated patches of the Milky Way’s center.
“It was like having a few snapshots of individual streets but no map of the city,” Longmore said.
He added: “We could see gas here, a star-forming cloud there, but we were missing how it was all connected.”
The scientists were surprised by what the telescope found, Longmore said. “These long, thin filaments that we see are streams of matter that are flowing along to make stars and planets, and that was unexpected,” he said.
Longmore also appreciates the image on an aesthetic level.
“The image of things that your eye naturally picks up that make it beautiful also has imprinted within it the physics that we’re interested in,” Longmore said.
“I think that that’s cool to me as a scientist and someone who also likes pretty pictures.”
The researchers would now like to use the James Webb Space Telescope or the Extremely Large Telescope, which is under construction in Chile, to see more.
“When astronomers combine observations at different wavelengths, we create color images where each color represents different physical information. You might see, for example, that where two gas clouds have crashed together … there are young stars forming right in the middle. So maybe that collision was what compressed the gas enough to make stars. That is the kind of cause-and-effect we can start to pin down when we combine these datasets,” Longmore said.
The team has requested observation time on the Webb telescope through a competitive proposal process, but Longmore said it was “so oversubscribed that your chances are pretty small”.
