Detecting Maggie - a 3,900 light-year long ghost crossing the galaxy containing Earth

Maggie is a mysterious, unknown, and one of the largest filamentous structures ever observed in a galaxy containing the Earth's Milky Way.

According to an article published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, based on data obtained from the THOR project, an observation program based on the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) system located in New Mexico, scientists Science has identified Maggie, a giant cosmic snake made of hydrogen, writhing on the other side of the Milky Way disk.

Breathtaking images of Maggie

It was an unusually large molecular gas cloud. While the largest molecular gas clouds ever known are only about 800 light-years long, Maggie reaches 3,900 light-years across and 130 light-years across.

Science Alert quoted Dr Henrik Beuther, head of THOR, as saying that the observations allowed them to determine the velocity of the hydrogen gas in Maggie and found it to be relatively uniform from start to finish, showing that Maggie was a very coherent object. The name Maggie was taken by him from the name of the longest river in his native Columbia: the Río Magdalena, with its anglicized name Magaret or Maggie.

Maggie is an object present very early, in the dawn of the universe.

The international research involved the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), where Dr. Beuther is working, the Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIFR) , University of Calgary, University of Heidelberg, Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Sciences, Argelander Institute of Astronomy, Indian Institute of Science, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).