A team of international astronomers including researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) have observed the central region of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail, revealing an intricate, turbulent network of cosmic gas filaments.
The area captured by the image stretches more than 650 light-years and surrounds the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy.
According to the research team, it is filled with dense clouds of gas and dust, hidden from ordinary view.
"It's a place of extremes, invisible to our eyes yet now revealed in extraordinary detail," Dr Ashley Barnes from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Germany said.
The striking new image, which gives us our most detailed look yet at the Milky Way's centre, was captured using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile.
The study will enable scientists to probe how stars form and evolve in the most extreme part of our galaxy, right next to the supermassive black hole at its centre.
It offers an unprecedented look at the cold gas - the raw material from which stars form - inside the Milky Way's Central Molecular Zone (CMZ).
This is the first time astronomers have explored the cold gas across this entire region with such exquisite detail.
"It is the only galactic nucleus close enough to Earth for us to study in such fine detail," Dr Barnes said.
The new dataset that the ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey (ACES) produced, reveals the CMZ on every scale - from vast gas structures tens of light-years across to tiny, compact clouds around individual newborn stars.
"The gas that ACES is targeting is cold molecular gas - the raw fuel from which stars form and that ultimately powers them," ANU Professor Christoph Federrath said.
This is the first time ALMA has scanned such a large region, making it the largest ALMA image ever produced.
In the sky, the resulting mosaic - created by stitching together many individual observations like pieces of an enormous cosmic puzzle - spans a length equivalent to three full moons placed side by side.
While star formation in the outer regions of the Milky Way is relatively well understood, the Galactic Centre is far more extreme.
"The CMZ hosts some of the most massive stars in our galaxy - stars that live fast and die young in spectacular explosions called supernovae, or even hypernovae," ACES leader Professor Steve Longmore, from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, said.
With ACES, astronomers hope to uncover how these energetic events influence the birth of new stars, and whether our current theories still hold in such harsh environments.
"A defining feature of all star-forming clouds is their highly turbulent, chaotic flows of gas and dust," Professor Federrath said.
"Near the Galactic Centre, this turbulence becomes extreme, weaving a dense, tangled web of filaments that ultimately collapse to form new stars."
Despite its fundamental importance, the origin of this turbulence remains one of the biggest open questions in astrophysics.
Researchers in Professor Federrath's group at ANU investigate this turbulence and its driving forces.
"By combining cutting-edge supercomputer simulations with observational datasets like ACES, we can finally begin to unravel the mysteries of the extreme, chaotic conditions under which stars are born," Professor Federrath said.
This research is presented in a series of papers describing the ACES dataset, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The data itself will be available from the ALMA Science Portal .
The international ACES team is comprised of more than 160 scientists from over 70 institutions across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia.
Photos of ALMA can be found online via this link .
