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What it is : Sagittarius C ( Sgr C ) region of theMilky Way .

Where it is:25,000 light - old age from thesolar systemin the constellation Sagittarius .

An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT radio telescope. At the center of the MeerKAT image the region surrounding the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole blazes bright. Huge vertical filamentary structures echo those captured on a smaller scale by Webb in Sagittarius C’s blue-green hydrogen cloud.

The Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT radio telescope array, with the James Webb Space Telescope’s image inset.

When it was shared : April 2 , 2025

Why it ’s so particular : TheMilky Wayoften appears as a reddish , pinkish and blueish - white arc across the night sky , but this new super - tenacious picture figure of speech from South Africa ’s ground - based MeerKAT wireless telescope shows our home galaxy in a completely new way .

Colored in dingy , cyan , yellow and lily-white , the main figure — whose many bubbles of colour are remnants of supernova — span 1,000 light - eld of the Milky Way .

An image of red swirling dust and sparkling stars in outer space

The newfangled wireless image help oneself to put in context of use the inset infraredimage by the James Webb Space Telescope from 2023of Sagittarius C ( Sgr C ) . This is a 44 light - yr - encompassing region about 200 light - age from the Milky Way ’s central supermassive disgraceful hollow , Sagittarius A * , where stars are being formed .

JWST ’s image discover more than 500,000 headliner , but in this Central Molecular Zone — an uttermost environment — star are not being form as quickly as astronomers expect . One grounds may be the impregnable magnetized fields around that supermassive grim maw , which are mold the filaments ascertain by MeerKAT and JWST . These magnetic flying field may also be strong enough to resist the gravity that causes slow clouds of gas pedal and dust to break down to create stars , thus suppressing star shaping in Sgr C.

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" A adult question in the Central Molecular Zone of our galaxy has been , if there is so much dense gas and cosmic dust here , and we know that stars constitute in such cloud , why are so few stars turn out here ? " saidJohn Bally , an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the principal investigator of a related paperpublishedApril 2 in The Astrophysical Journal . " Now , for the first time , we are seeing like a shot that stiff magnetic fields may play an important role in inhibit ace establishment , even at little scales , " Bally pronounce in aNASAstatement .

a photo of a nebula that looks like two overlapping circles

MeerKAT is a radio scope made up of 64 dishes in South Africa ’s Karoo region . It will finally form part of a far large radio scope called the Square Kilometre Array , the world ’s big and most sensitive radio telescope that will also use more than 130,000 Christmas tree - shaped antennas on the traditional Land of the Wajarri Yamaji , in Murchison , Western Australia .

For more sublime space effigy , hold in out ourSpace Photo of the Week archives .

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