Scientists Detected Mysterious 'Morse Code' in Milky Way's Center

The Milky Way galaxy, where we live, is a spiral galaxy that appeared around 14 billion years ago. It’s filled with stars, nebulae, planets, asteroids, and more. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy that contains our Solar System. It appears as a hazy band of light in the night sky, formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The galaxy has an estimated diameter of 87,400 light-years and is about 1,000 light-years thick at the spiral arms. It is estimated to contain 100-400 billion stars. The Milky Way has several satellite galaxies and is part of the Local Group of galaxies, which form part of the Virgo Supercluster. The Solar System is located at a radius of about 27,000 light-years from the Galactic Center, on the inner edge of the Orion Arm, one of the spiral-shaped concentrations of gas and dust. The stars in the innermost 10,000 light-years form a bulge and one or more bars that radiate from the bulge. It takes our sun 250 million years to make one revolution around the center of our home galaxy.

Recently, an international team of scientists discovered something new in the center of the Milky Way. It resembles Morse code and is spreading out like spokes on a wheel going away from the black hole. Scientists were excited when they made the discovery and managed to confirm that the filaments were tied to the outflow of the black hole. Thanks to them, it became possible to study the spin of the black hole and the orientation of its accretion disk.

The filaments can be viewed with radio waves and seem to be tied to processes happening in the galactic center. There are around 1,000 vertical ones and they appear in pairs and clusters. The horizontal ones seem to be around 6 million years old. The new discovery is still filled with unknowns and astronomers are ready to start unraveling them.

Astronomers discovered an object that released massive bursts of radio energy three times every hour. Such frequent pulsation has never been observed before. Research teams found out that the object is likely to be 4,000 light years away from Earth, super bright, and has an incredibly strong magnetic field. However, it isn’t supposed to have enough power to produce such radio waves every 20 minutes.

Theories about the origin of this mysterious object vary. Some experts claim it could be an ultra-long period magnetar, others think it might be a white dwarf or the remnants of a collapsed star. But it also might be something entirely new. Astronomers managed to observe the signal across a wide range of frequencies, which means it has a natural origin and isn’t artificial.

Another mystery about the Milky Way is that the center of our galaxy emitted much more gamma radiation than its outskirts. Something is glowing incredibly brightly right in the middle of the Milky Way, but no one has been able to find a plausible explanation for this phenomenon for almost a decade. Some astronomers suggested that the central region of the Milky Way was glowing with such intensity because Dark Matter was getting destroyed there. However, if the mystifying glow was created by the annihilation of Dark Matter, then gamma-ray particles would get distributed evenly in space instead of gathering together in clumps.

An alternative explanation is that the glow is caused by a group of millisecond pulsars, which are neutron stars spinning incredibly fast. Several studies have concluded that due to the nature of the light, millisecond pulsars are the best explanation for this phenomenon. However, many scientists are still not persuaded and want proof.