Do-Young Byun

At the center of the distant galaxy NGC 1052, an invisible engine is at work. It accelerates clouds of gas to speeds at which sulfur oxide (SO) molecules begin to absorb radio waves. Astronomers caught this radiation using a network of Korean radio telescopes operating as a single instrument the size of a continent.

At the center of our Galaxy lies a dense forest of dust and gas. Starlight barely penetrates this thicket, like a flashlight in fog. But it is precisely there, in this dense cloud, that new stars are born. Scientists decided to look into this fog. They took light from 15 bright stars that shine through cold clouds.

Radio waves passing through magnetized gas have their polarization slightly rotated, like a compass needle deflecting near a magnet. This rotation, called the Faraday effect, revealed the invisible environment around the supermassive black hole in galaxy NGC 1275.