There's a mysterious dark patch in the Milky Way, and it's weirder than we thought. (Patreon)

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

The Brick is a boxy cloud of opaque dust at the centre of the Milky Way, which has confused scientists ever since its discovery 30 years ago. It just got even weirder.

Astrophysicists originally thought that the Brick was just full of dense gases, which would absorb light. But then it should also have been full of young stars born from this dense gas. Yet those are nowhere to be seen. In reality, the Brick is closer to a nunnery than a maternity ward.

According to the new paper by an international team of astronomersnow, the Brick is full of ice crystals, made of carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is one of the gasses coming out of car exhaust pipes. You normally don’t see it as ice though, or if you do, maybe you accidentally drove to Saturn, because the freezing point of carbon monoxide is minus 205 degrees Celsius.

And that’s the stuff the researchers say is in the Brick. They figured this out with Webb’s infrared telescope. They used this to measure how much of the light that came from the other side of the brick was filtered out by it. From this they learned it contained significant amounts of this carbon monoxide ice.

This is extremely weird because according to our current models of galaxy formations such a cloud just shouldn’t be there. No one has any idea at the moment how it got there or what it’s doing there, it’s very confusing. It’s also very interesting because astrophysicists are still trying to understand the distribution and structure of matter in galactic centers which is super important for the debate whether dark matter of modified gravity is correct.

Though I think it’s just a huge traffic jam and it’s exhaust fumes from alien spacecraft.