Their peer-reviewed research and more details about the photo have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.<\/a><\/p>\n‘A place of extremes’ at the centre of the universe<\/p>\n
The image shows multiple gas structures, some spanning light-years across, and others only surrounding individual stars.<\/p>\n
The Central Molecular Zone harbours dense clouds of gas and dust near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy.<\/p>\n
Ashley Barnes is an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Germany and part of the team surveying the region.<\/p>\n
“It’s a place of extremes, invisible to our eyes, but now revealed in extraordinary detail,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It is the only galactic nucleus close enough to Earth for us to study in such detail.”<\/p>\n
The cold molecular gas inside the zone is the raw material from which stars form \u2014 a process the ACES team has been studying to better understand the birth of stars in such an extreme environment.<\/p>\n
The ALMA telescope, located on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Atacama Desert, consists of 66 high-precision antennas operating at wavelengths of 0.32mm to 3.6mm.<\/p>\n
The regions it photographs exist at temperatures of “just a few dozen degrees above absolute zero”, \u20142,730 degrees Celsius.<\/p>\n
Dr Caroline Foster, an astronomer and associate professor at the University of New South Wales, said she was excited to see what the new map could mean for her own research.<\/p>\n
Loading Instagram content<\/p>\n
“They’re looking at clouds that are around individual newborn stars, or large star-forming complexes in an area of the galaxy where the gas is different to what we have looked at so far,” she said.<\/p>\n
“We know that there’s different chemistry, there’s probably more turbulence towards the centre of the galaxy, [it’s] something that we’ve not been able to see elsewhere.<\/p>\n
“That’s exciting for my research, because I work mainly on galaxies further away, not our own Milky Way. But I do look at things like star formation and how [it] changes across cosmic time \u2026 these [Central Molecular Zone] conditions are probably closer to some of the stuff I look at in my day to day.”<\/p>\n
She added the image had been coloured, likely meaning the team involved had highlighted different chemistry, temperatures and structures in the gas.<\/p>\n
“Basically, when we take an image on a telescope, typically what we’ll do is put a filter in front of our detector,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Somewhere inside the instrument, we put a piece of glass that only lets through very specific colours.<\/p>\n
“If we put that filter on, that means it only lets through the light that’s of those colours.<\/p>\n
“And so even though our image appears in black and white on our screen, we can recolour it.<\/p>\n
“The colours are fake, but they are reflective of what’s actually going on there so that our eyes can see the image, because we cannot see in the radio.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new photo taken by the world’s most powerful radio telescope has revealed “extraordinary detail” in the most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":503815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[145499,305,64,63,36750,111285,128,285,15759],"class_list":["post-503814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-alma-telescope","tag-astronomy","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-galaxies","tag-milky-way-galaxy","tag-science","tag-space","tag-telescope"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/503815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}