Thousands of strand-like structures never seen before have been discovered by researchers looking into the center of the Milky Way.
Some of the structures are up to 150 light-years long, or 40 times the distance between Earth and the nearest star system.
The strings of a harp come in pairs and equally-spaced sets. The Astrophysical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters accepted two studies that show that all of them bristle with energy.
There are 12 strangest objects in the universe.
Scientists have known for a long time that there are spindly structures around the center of the universe. Studying the structures in bulk could help researchers figure out how they were created.
The study lead author, Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University in Illinois, said in a statement that it was difficult to draw a conclusion about what they were and where they came from.
The center of the Milky Way is filled with objects that are too obscured by gas and dust to be seen with visible light. Astronomers can see some of the powerful structures and interactions occurring in the center of the universe by focusing on the energetic radio waves.
The authors of the new studies observed the radio activity of the center for 200 hours over three years. The researchers pieced together a mosaic of 20 separate observations, each focusing on a different part of the radio sky.
The resulting panorama captures many known sources of radio waves, such as bright supernova remnants and the gassy regions of space where new stars are twinkling to life.
What are these structures? According to Yusef-Zadeh, the best hypothesis is that the high-energy particles accelerated through space at nearly the speed of light, moving through a magnetic field. The source of the Cosmic rays that are blasted into space from the center of the Milky Way remains a mystery.
One possibility is that the huge pair of radio bubbles from the center of the universe are just above the plane. Each bubble of radio energy towers 25,000 light-years high, and is thought to have been produced by an explosion from the central black hole.
The authors of the new studies say that many of the newly-detected radio filaments fall within the cavities of these enormous bubbles. It is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 This explanation leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
We don't know why they come in clusters, and we don't know how these regular spacings happen.
The researchers said that future surveys will look at whether the filaments move or stay the same.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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