The Milky Way galaxy—our home galaxy—is erupting. Two monumental geysers are blasting out of its heart in opposite directions, and astronomers recently got the clearest view of them ever seen.

I’m actually rather stunned at this. If you had radio-vision, and you could see these streams of matter, you’d have to physically turn around to see the whole thing end-to-end. In real numbers, the material is about 50,000 light years long—half the length of the galaxy itself—and is rushing away from the center of the galaxy at a mind-numbing 1000 kilometers per second!

More good reading about this being from star formation, not winds from a black hole at Bad Astronomy along with the must see uncropped image.