A new telescope in South Africa will show us the center of the Milky Way

We had recently reported that the most advanced new telescope radio to date, MeerKAT, was inaugurated in Carnarvon, South Africa and that it has now started operations. MeerKAT, in its first days of operation, has already managed to take an amazing image, which is considered the clearest image from the center of our galaxy right up here.

The image features a flaming area that is surrounded by the supermbadive black hole, which is located at the absolute center of the Milky Way, about 25,000 light-years away.

The picture shows details incredible that no one has ever seen before. It offers the experts a better view of the supernova remnants previously known, the regions that are known to form stars and the strange filamentous structures that can only be found near the central black hole and nowhere else in the entire galaxy. These structures were first identified in the 1980s, but the source of these structures is still unknown to scientists.

"This image is remarkable, showing so many features never seen before, including compact sources badociated with certain filaments, that it could provide the key to deciphering the code and solving this three-decade enigma," said Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in Illinois.He is a leading expert on these filament-like structures.

This spectacular new image is however one of many new views of the universe that MeerKAT has captured.This image proves that MeerKAT will become one of the most important tools in the future to capture the condition of the center of the Milky Way.

This is basically one of those areas that are extremely difficult to examine, as it is located behind the constellation Sagittarius and is shrouded in clouds of gas and dust.Now, this MeerKAT telescope is able to look through these clouds; he can spot the radio wave lengths, which can pierce them.

"We wanted to show the scientific capabilities of this new instrument.The center of the galaxy was an obvious target: unique, visually striking and full of unexplained phenomena – but also notoriously difficult to image using radio telescopes. Even though the early days of MeerKAT are still coming and there is still much to do, we decided to go there and we were stunned by the results, "says Camilo's Fernando Camilo

the chief scientist of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, the same organization that has built and will now operate the telescope.