Let’s get one thing straight: the Milky Way is massive. Absolutely huge, beyond anything you can even imagine.

Our solar system (you know, the 18-trillion-miles-plus of space that we are just tiny specks in) is just one very small part of it, in fact, we rest on one of the galaxy’s outer arms.

So what else is out there – not even out there in the wider universe, but just in our galaxy?

Well, lots of stuff, it turns out – plenty that we don’t even know about yet. But thanks to a study from an international team of astronomers, we’ve just found out one more little thing about it – one little gamechanger of a thing.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile, the researchers took the most detailed look yet at the centre of the Milky Way – an area that spans 650 light years.

At the heart of that 650 light years? Well, there sits a supermassive black hole, the one that everything we know is situated around.

Toward the heart of our galaxy, a whole lot of gas, even more dust, so much that it obscures anything we might ordinarily have been able to see in the usual ways. And the gas itself? Cold gas, which is what ultimately forms stars, viewed in detail by the astronomers for the first time in history, as Professor Christoph Federrath explained in a  statement:

“The gas that [we are] targeting is cold molecular gas – the raw fuel from which stars form and that ultimately powers them. A defining feature of all star-forming clouds is their highly turbulent, chaotic flows of gas and dust. Near the Galactic Centre, this turbulence becomes extreme, weaving a dense, tangled web of filaments that ultimately collapse to form new stars.”

Incredibly, this view into the center of our galaxy was also the largest image the telescope has produced to date, resulting in a huge patchwork image that helped the astronomers to begin to understand how the birth of new stars truly occurs in situ.

And, as the researchers explain in a series of papers which will be published serially in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, this is highly significant work using not only the telescope but the work of supercomputer modelling too, as Professor Federrath confirmed in the statement:

“By combining cutting-edge supercomputer simulations with observational datasets like ACES, we can finally begin to unravel the mysteries of the extreme, chaotic conditions under which stars are born.”

One day, perhaps, we’ll understand our universe wholly and fully. But for now, learning is all part of the fun.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.