More Strange Cosmic Threads Discovered Outside Our Galaxy, And They're Huge

We're getting closer to figuring out what's going on in the center of the Milky Way.

For the first time, these long, magnetized filaments have been seen emerging from other galaxies. The range of environments in which they can be found allows scientists to narrow down the mechanisms that make them.

Since the 1980s, astronomer Farhad Yusuf-Zadeh of the US has been puzzling over the structure of the universe.

There are two possible explanations according to the man. The first is an interaction between the wind and clouds and the second is turbulence caused by weak magnetic fields.

"We know a lot about the filaments in our own center, and now they are starting to show up as a new population of extragalactic filaments," he says.

Even though the environments are vastly different, the underlying physical mechanisms are the same. The objects are part of the same family, but they are not related to each other.

Most recently, a radio telescope in South Africa discovered around 1,000 of the filaments, which measure up to 150 light-years in length and hang in oddly neat and orderly arrangements.

The telescope's sensitivity allowed it to see through the thick dust and gas that obscures much of what's inside the center of our solar system. Cosmic ray electrons spin around in magnetic fields at close to the speed of light, and magnetic fields are amplified along the entire length of the filaments, according to radio observations.

It was going to be difficult to figure out why they were there without more information. A huge breakthrough has been found in four different galaxy clusters.

I was very excited to see these beautiful structures after studying them for many years. Something universal is happening because we found these filaments elsewhere in the universe.

Our galaxy's thread-like structures are different in a number of ways. The jets and lobes of radio galaxies are huge structures that erupt from the center of the universe. The structures in the center of the Milky Way are between 100 and 1000 times larger.

Some of them have lengths up to 200 kiloparsecs.

It's about five times the size of our entire universe. Their electrons are on a long scale. It would take a million years for an electron to travel at the speed of light. They travel at a slower pace.

Their magnetic fields are not as strong as they could be. They are often at right angles to the jets. The stars appear to be centered on the disk.

The similarities are strong The length-to-width ratio is the same for the galactic and extragalactic filaments. The same mechanism needs to work on different scales.

One such mechanism would be winds. Black holes and star formation can cause wind to blow out into space. There are clouds of gas and dust in space that could be pushed into by the winds.

Simulations suggested that turbulence could be generated by the forces of nature. The turbulence can create eddies in the intergalactic medium, around which weak magnetic fields can be stretched out into filaments.

It is not a conclusive answer. We don't know if the same mechanism is responsible for both types of structures.

According to Yusuf-Zadeh, all of these are very old.

They are almost from a different era of our Universe and show that there is a common origin for the creation of the filaments. This is amazing.

The research has appeared in a journal.