Radio Image of Milkyway's Center, by MEERKAT Radio Telescope
Radio Image of Milkyway's Center, by MEERKAT Radio Telescope
This image is one of my favorite images of space in recent memory. I've tried to play around with the raw data from the telescope (which is in .tiff format) but I couldn't do it. So far I've made a couple of upscaled images using AI, I might get a print and put it somewhere in my home
I went to https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac449a to try and learn the size of these various weird shapes, naively supposing they are all AT the Milkyway center. But of course the radiotelescope "sees" whatever is on that line of sight. So some of the objects are thought to be active galactic nuclei in the far distance, and one particulary circular ring is thought to be a newly disovered supernova remnant - though whether closer or farther than the center I did not glean. The image covers 6.5 "square degrees" so at a distance of about 7.7kpc, that corresponds to some particular area I don't know how to calculate and thus some linear scale could be estimated - albeit some of the objects, not being at the 7.7kpc distance will be larger or smaller than the scale would suggest. Anyone know how to do that?
well, I put on my thinking cap and came up with an image area of 0.12 square parsecs at the distance of Sag*, so roughly an image span of 0.3pc, or about a light-year or 70k astronomical units, if my ciphering is on track.
Looks great, do you have a link to original tiff file?
It's been a while since the image came out, I was able to search for This. If I recall correctly, you might be able to access original files (over a gigabyte each) by searching for the original paper on Google