Astronomers See Through the Milky Way's Dust to Track Where Radiation is Coming From at the Center
chromas writes:
It's an astronomical peculiarity that in some ways we know more about other galaxies than we do about our own. Scientists have examined the energy coming from the center of thousands of other spiral galaxies in visible light. But for our own Milky Way, that knowledge is blocked by thick clouds of gas and dust.
A team of researchers examined decades of data from the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper telescope (WHAM) for clues about the Milky Way's energy. Their results are in a paper titled "Discovery of diffuse optical emission lines from the inner Galaxy: Evidence for LI(N)ER-like gas."
[...] There's an enormous amount of hydrogen near the center of the Milky Way. That hydrogen is ionized by the energy from the galactic center. As an ionized gas, it's had its electrons stripped away. The WHAM telescope is designed to see the ionized hydrogen, which appears red when viewed with the 'scope.
It's not just that the hydrogen is ionized. After a gas is ionized, the ions usually recombine to neutrality in a short period of time. The fact that all of this hydrogen is continually ionized by a source of energy is the link between the WHAM data and the energy at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers have thought that the source of energy for this ionization is star formation, but that's not conclusive.
WHAM is tailor-made to study ionized gas. The Milky Way contains a thick layer of it, called the Warm Ionized Medium (WIM), which is a distinct and major component of the galactic interstellar medium. The WIM is WHAM's primary target.
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