Chemistry at the heart of the Milky Way has never looked so gorgeous

Astronomers captured this stunning image of the Milky Way’s center, revealing a web of gas, dust and stars in extraordinary detail

By Claire Cameron edited by Jeanna Bryner

This image shows the location of the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ), a region at the core of our galaxy rich in dense and intricate gas clouds. — ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Longmore et al. Stars in inset: ESO/D. Minniti et al. Milky Way: ESO/S. Guisard

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In the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, there is beauty in chaos. There dense clouds of dust and spindly filaments of cold molecular gas, the basic matter from which stars form, encircle the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. And now a new image reveals that beauty in unprecedented detail.

Taken using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the image displays our galaxy as a “place of extremes, invisible to our eyes, but now revealed in extraordinary detail,” said Ashley Barnes, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Germany, in a statement.

The ALMA image showing the galaxy's central molecular zone, with gas and dust picked out in pink — ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Longmore et al. Background: ESO/D. Minniti et al.

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The image captures an area more than 650 light-years across in what is known as the central molecular zone (CMZ). Inside lurk gas structures that span many dozens of light-years and the smaller clouds that envelope stars. Astronomers are particularly interested in the zone’s chemistry because its gas feeds into the matter from which stars grow.

Studying this region of the Milky Way can offer clues as to how galaxies like our own formed, said Steve Longmore, an astrophysicist at Liverpool John Moores University in England, in the same statement. “We believe the region shares many features with galaxies in the early Universe, where stars were forming in chaotic, extreme environments,” added Longmore, who is also part of the team that captured the new observations.

The image, which is the largest ever captured by ALMA, is part of the ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey. The new data were described in several papers that were posted on the preprint server arXiv.org and accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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