Astronomers have peered into the center of the Milky Way and discovered what appears to be a miniature spiral galaxy.
It is located approximately 26 000light years from Earth, not far from the dense and dusty galactic center. It is about 32 times more massive than the Sun and lies within a huge disk of swirling gas known as a protostellar disk. Its width is about 4,000 astronomical units (this is 4,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun).
Such disks are widely usedin the Universe and serve as stellar fuel, which helps young stars turn into large bright objects over millions of years. But astronomers had never seen anything like it before: a miniature galaxy orbiting dangerously close to the center of yet another.
During the study, scientists usedHigh-definition photographs taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile. It turned out that the spiral shape of the disk is given not by the form of movement, but by the interaction with some unknown, mysterious object the size of three Suns.
To test this hypothesis, the team calculateda dozen potential orbits of the mysterious object, and then carried out simulations. The goal is to see if any of these could bring an object close enough to the protostellar disk to spin it into a spiral. Scientists discovered that if the object had followed one specific path, it could have slipped past the disk about 12,000 years ago. This disturbed the dust just enough to create the bright spiral shape seen today.
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