An international team of astrophysicists has discovered mysterious gaseous filaments at the center of the Milky Way, which may have originated from the outflow of matter from the central supermassive black hole. The discovery is reported in an article published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Filaments are thin and long threads of gas and dust. These structures were first discovered by a team led by Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in the 1980s. They were located vertically near Sagittarius A * (Sgr A *) - a compact radio source in the center of the Milky Way, which is a supermassive black hole. Now Jozef-Zadeh has reported the discovery of a new type of filament that lies horizontally, radiating away from the black hole.

The observations were made with the MeerKAT telescope at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory. To search for new filaments among the surrounding structures, astronomers used the method of eliminating the background and smoothing the noise in the images obtained by the radio telescope.

Although the two populations of filaments share similar traits, astrophysicists suggest that they originate in different ways. While the vertical filaments stretch through the galaxy for 150 light-years, the horizontal filaments are more like short dashes and dots 5-10 light-years long. In addition, vertical filaments have a magnetic field and move at relativistic speeds, while horizontal filaments emit thermal radiation that originates in molecular clouds.

Scientists suggest that they could result from the outflow of matter from the accretion disk around the supermassive black hole. This outflow aligned the structures of gas and dust along radial lines in the plane of the galaxy. The rate of outflow of matter to create the pressure necessary for equalization is estimated at ten thousandth the mass of the Sun per year. Based on this, the age of the filaments reaches about six million years.