Scientists have captured the most complete, high-resolution map of the cold gas at the center of the Milky Way, which contains the raw material from which stars and planets are made. Information from the image could help astronomers understand the origin of our solar system.The image is the product of a four-year international effort using one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, a collection of more than 50 radio antennae spread across a high plateau in the Chilean Andes.“We’ve never had a picture of what’s happening right in the center of our galaxy before,” said Steven Longmore, a professor of astrophysics at Liverpool John Moores University who led the project called the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Central Molecular Zone Exploration Survey, or ACES. “We’ve had lots of detailed studies on small regions, but this is the first time that we’ve had an entire map of the cold gas in the center of our galaxy.”AdvertisementAdvertisementPrevious observations of the Milky Way have been like snapshots taken in different spots of the same city, Longmore explained. This Milky Way image, however, is like a top-down view of the entire city. “You don’t get the full story of a city unless you have a total map of it,” he said.A map of molecular gasThe galactic center of the Milky Way — known as the Central Molecular Zone, or CMZ — is far denser, hotter and more turbulent than the regions of space closer to Earth, Longmore said. At its very core is Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole roughly 4 million times more massive than our sun.This part of the galaxy has the strongest gravitational pull, “so everything is trying to fall into that,” Longmore said. He compared it to a draining bathtub — the black hole acts as the drain and vast clouds of molecular gas act as the swirling water.The new image maps the molecular gas, whic …
