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In 1984, astronomer Farhad Yusef Zadeh was observing the night sky when he spotted something rather unusual that stopped him in his tracks. He had been working on his PhD at Columbia University, attempting to figure out the nature of compact sources. But along with colleague Don Chance and University of California at Los Angeles professor Mark Morris, he helped identify three large arcs some 150 light years long.
At first they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Though the existence of filaments had been proposed by Swedish plasma physicist Hannes Alfvén and later proven, nobody other than him thought these one-dimensional strands would stretch to such lengths. Even Yusef-Zadeh, now of Northwestern University in Illinois, wasn’t trying to prove the existence of filaments. “We were trying to figure out the nature of compact sources in this region,” he says.
But here was a small team staring at potential proof – a discovery made using the Very Large Array (VLA), the world’s most widely used radio telescope, located 80 kilometres (50 miles) west of Socorro, New Mexico. “It was an accident,” Yusef-Zadeh recalls. “It turned out the compact sources – expected to be HII regions associated with star formation – were peaks of extended filamentary structures. But since this type of structure hadn’t been seen before, we were suspicious that they were real.”
MAGNETIC FILAMENTS
BY NUMBERS
1,000
Number of magnetic strands found at the Milky Way's centre
TEN
times more than previously discovered
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Issue 129 من All About Space.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Issue 129 من All About Space.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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LONG AGO, A LAKE ON MARS MAY HAVE BEEN SPRAWLING WITH MICROBES
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MOON TOUR HELL
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THIS MONTH'S PLANETS
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UNIVERSE BEFORE TIME
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CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Alongside Earth, our planetary neighbourhood is changing, but it’s not for the better…
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The Milky Way's halo is filled with ‘magnetic doughnuts' as wide as 100,000 light years
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The Pentagon wants the commercial space reserve to support military satellites in orbit
The US Department of Defense is developing a plan to use the ever-growing American commercial space industry for national security purposes.
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DOES A COSMIC 'GLITCH' IN GRAVITY CHALLENGE ALBERT EINSTEIN'S GREATEST THEORY?
Gravity changes once you reach a cosmic scale
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DEEP SKY CHALLENGE : STELLAR TREASURES OF THE ARCHER AND SCORPION
Summer skies are stuffed full of amazing objects for your telescope - if you're prepared to stay up late