The Truth Behind The Milky Way's Mysterious Lobe
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New observations reveal a foreground gas loop
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The article that has now resolved this decades-old astronomical mystery - a gigantic feature previously assumed to rise high above the galactic center - appeared in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and was led by astrophysicist Kathryn Kreckel of Heidelberg University. A vast and energetically glowing plume that seemed to be spurting out from Sagittarius A, the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, has turned out to be a nearby and closed loop of gas in the foreground based on new Sloan Digital Sky Survey Local Volume Mapper observational data.