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The MeerKat Radio Telescope has captured the clearest view of the Milky Way Galaxy’s center to date as part of its inauguration of one of the newest and most advanced radio telescopes. “Clear” is, of course, a relative term considering that the region surrounding the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is a chaotic region roughly 25,000 light-years away. The image spans an area of about 1,000 by 500 light-years, or about 2 degrees by 1 degree across our night sky.

Just getting a clear image of the area around the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy was enough to excite experts like Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who studies the filaments found around the black hole but nowhere else in the galaxy. These filaments were first detected by the Very Large Array in New Mexico, but remain a mystery partly because it is difficult to get any clear data about them. The picture has been translated into visible light to show the contrasts in the radio waves’ brightness.

“The MeerKAT image … shows so many features never before seen, including compact sources associated with some of the filaments, that it could provide the key to cracking the code and solve this three-decade riddle,” Farhad Yusef-Zadeh said in a statement.

“We wanted to show the science capabilities of this new instrument,” said Fernando Camilo, chief scientist of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), which operates MeerKAT.

The MeerKAT Radio Telescope consists of 64 individual dishes capable of picking up radio waves and resides in the Karoo region of South Africa. It is the most sensitive telescope of its kind.

Scientists anticipate that there will be high demand for the new MeerKAT Radio Telescope for many years. Officially, MeerKAT is a precursor for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a project that uses similar hardware but is expected to be more sensitive.