A new population of radio filaments in the Galactic Plane

One of the most striking features in the night sky is a bright band of light stretching across the sky. We call this the Milky Way and this band shows the distribution of stars throughout the disc of our Galaxy. The Milky Way is home to a surprisingly complex "ecology" of dusty clouds of gas, stars and planets. Over millions or billions of years matter within these clouds is constantly cycling backwards and forwards from gas to stars and back again. One of the surprising things about this cycle is that stars form very slowly and inefficiently from gas clouds, much more inefficiently than expected. This suggests that there is a feedback process slowing down star formation. One of the culprits are particles travelling through space at relativistic speeds called cosmic rays, which heat up the gas clouds. Cosmic rays also affect things on Earth - from lightning to satellites and electronics. Cosmic rays are spread throughout our Galaxy and others but because they diffuse throughout the Milky Way we cannot trace the individual sources of cosmic rays. With a recently built radio telescope (MeerKAT) we have found a new population of filaments in the Milky Way that are glowing at radio wavelengths. This glow is called synchrotron radiation and allows us to infer the presence of relativistic (i.e. cosmic ray) electrons. Tracing the location of these filaments and understanding their nature will allow us to determine the origin of cosmic rays in the Milky Way for the first time.