Scientists have unveiled the largest, most-detailed-ever map of the chaotic gas clouds at our galaxy's center. The resulting image could take years to analyze but promises to help unravel the mysteries of how the earliest stars lived and died right after the Big Bang.
The new observations, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope in Chile, cover 650 light-years' worth of structures surrounding the Milky Way's central black hole, deep within the constellation Sagittarius. This region is known as the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) for its many clouds of dense molecular gas and is thought to closely mirror the compact and chaotic conditions of the earliest galaxies in the universe.
