New telescope offers clearest view of Milky Way's brilliant center

Brett Molina | USA TODAY

A new telescope in South Africa captured a panoramic image of what scientists claim is the clearest view yet of the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

The MeerKAT radio telescope was built and operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), and is located in the country's Northern Cape.

The telescope captured a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which sits 25,000 light years away from Earth and cannot be viewed with regular telescopes because it's covered up by clouds of dust and gas.

"We wanted to show the science capabilities of this new instrument," said Fernando Camilo, chief scientist of SARAO, in a statement. "The center of the galaxy was an obvious target: unique, visually striking and full of unexplained phenomena — but also notoriously hard to image using radio telescopes."

Researchers said the panorama captured an area of about 1,000 light years by 500 light years. The telescope has been under construction for the last decade.

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The colors displayed in the image link to the brightness of the radio waves recorded by the telescope, with red for faint emissions to orange, yellow and white for the brightest.

Among details captured by the image are magnetized filaments near the black hole at the center, but not present anywhere else in the galaxy. They were first discovered in 1980, said scientists.

"The MeerKAT image has such clarity," said Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of the department of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University and one of the world’s leading experts on the Milky Way, in a statement. "It shows so many features never before seen, including compact sources associated with some of the filaments."

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