In NASA’s efforts to map the Milky Way galaxy, scientists captured an image of the galaxy’s central zone. The central zone is highlighted by a candy cane-shaped portion in the captured image. This galactic candy cane isn’t edible at all, as it is part of a set of radio-emitting filaments extending 190 light-years, Science Daily detailed:
This image includes newly published observations using an instrument designed and built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Called the Goddard-IRAM Superconducting 2-Millimeter Observer (GISMO), the instrument was used in concert with a 30-meter radio telescope located on Pico Veleta, Spain, operated by the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range headquartered in Grenoble, France.
"GISMO observes microwaves with a wavelength of 2 millimeters, allowing us to explore the galaxy in the transition zone between infrared light and longer radio wavelengths," said Johannes Staguhn, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who leads the GISMO team at Goddard. "Each of these portions of the spectrum is dominated by different types of emission, and GISMO shows us how they link together."
GISMO detected the most prominent radio filament in the galactic center, known as the Radio Arc, which forms the straight part of the cosmic candy cane.
image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center via Science Daily