Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2026

MAY-JUNE 2026 A stronomers have captured the central region of our Milky Way in a striking new image, unveiling a complex network of filaments of cosmic gas in unprec- Hidden chemistry at the heart of the Milky Way by ESO Bárbara Ferreira edented detail. Obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submil- limeter Array (ALMA), this rich dataset — the largest ALMA image to date — will allow astronomers to probe the lives of stars in the most extreme region of our galaxy, next to the supermassive black hole at its centre. “It’s a place of extremes, in- visible to our eyes, but now revealed in extraordinary detail,” says Ashley Barnes, an astronomer at the Euro- pean Southern Observatory (ESO) in Germany who is part of the team that obtained the new data. The ob- servations provide a unique view of the cold gas — the raw material from which stars form — within the so-called Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) of our galaxy. It is the first