Out there
“The country that controls the magnetic field will control the universe.” Dick Tracy, the fictional detective in Chester Gould's 1962 comic strip, confirmed so.
But does magnetism control the universe?
About seven stars are born each year in the Milky Way, our home galaxy. They come from dust and in the end they return to dust. Now, a celestial image, an Impressionist swirl of color at the center of the Milky Way, represents the first step toward understanding the role those magnetic fields play in our cycle of death and rebirth. the stars.
This image was created by David Chuss, a physicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and an international team of astronomers. This project is called FIREPLACE, for Large Area CMZ Probing by Far Infrared Polarization. The team's map reveals previously invisible details in the 500 light-year-wide central Milky Way galaxy.
The colors represent the different temperatures of interstellar dust: Green indicates dense, cool dust; pink indicates warmer dust. Through these colors are lines indicating the direction of magnetic force in the clouds. The yellow streaks are jets of hot ionized gas, emitting radio waves. Jet plane was first recorded two years ago by the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.
Every new generation of eyes sees a new version of our galaxy.
To map the galaxy's magnetic field lines, Dr. Chuss and his colleagues flew at an altitude of 45,000 feet on the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, a 747 equipped for astronomy. A special spectrometer measured the polarization direction of infrared light emitted from the dust, revealing the direction of the magnetic field point by point.
The center of the Milky Way is barely noticeable to the right of the map's center, just below a small blob that resembles a sideways figure eight. In the middle of the dusty blob is a monster black hole, around which the entire galaxy spins like a conveyor belt.
“The next step is to figure out what all this means,” Dr. Chuss said in an interview. Embedded in this map may be clues to some of nature's deepest, most complex processes, including how stars, the source of all light and life in the universe, formed how.
“It will provide the ability to test new theories and guide the development of the next generation of astronomical discoveries,” Dr Chuss said.
Made by Antonio de Luca And Elijah Walker.
Image: Villanova/Paré University, Karpovich, Chuss (PI).
