'Unlike any objects we know': Scientists get their best-ever view of 'space tornadoes' howling at the Milky Way's center

An abstract image with a black and white background, and red, glowing scratchy shapes in the middle.

"Space tornadoes" are swirling near the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, new telescope observations have revealed in unprecedented detail.

Astronomers recently zoomed in on the cosmic twisters using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. Although these rotating structures had been seen previously, the new observations with ALMA are 100 times sharper than the earlier views, the team reported in a new paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.