Astronomers capture most detailed view of Milky Way's turbulent heart

CANBERRA, Feb. 27 (Xinhua) -- An international team of astronomers has captured the most detailed image yet of the Milky Way's turbulent center.

The area captured by the image, produced with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, stretches over 650 light-years and surrounds the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy, said a statement from The Australian National University (ANU) on Thursday.

Researchers said the region is filled with dense clouds of gas and dust that remain hidden from ordinary view, describing it as "a place of extremes" now revealed in extraordinary detail.

The study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, will enable scientists to probe how stars form and evolve in the most extreme part of our galaxy, right next to the supermassive black hole at its center, the statement said.

It offers an unprecedented look at the cold gas -- the raw material from which stars form -- inside the Milky Way's Central Molecular Zone, it added.

While star formation in the Milky Way's outer regions is well understood, the Galactic Center is far more extreme, and astronomers hope to learn how its energetic events shape new stars and whether current theories still hold in such harsh environments, the study said.

"A defining feature of all star-forming clouds is their highly turbulent, chaotic flows of gas and dust," said ANU Professor Christoph Federrath.

"Near the Galactic Center, this turbulence becomes extreme, weaving a dense, tangled web of filaments that ultimately collapse to form new stars," said Federrath, who leads an ANU group investigating this turbulence and its driving forces, one of the biggest open questions in astrophysics. ■