fantastic journey to the center of the earth

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THE FABULOUS JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

Viaje al centro de la tierra.

Based on the famous Jules Verne tome, this Spanish interpretation of the classic tale features Kenneth More as Otto Lindenbrock, the naturalist and professor who makes his way to the planet’s core.

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Inside 'Journey to the Center of the Earth'

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In the crowded summer movie marketplace, a great gimmick can make a film stand out, provide­d it's done well and fits the story. As the first live-action flick shot in digital 3-D , "Journey to the Center of the Earth" scores big on both counts. This latest adaptation of Jules Verne's 1864 novel is an eye-popping thrill ride thanks to the illusion of depth created by the 3-D process.

Under the direction of first-time feature director Eric Brevig, who served as visual effects supervisor on such films as "Pearl Harbor," "Men in Black," and "Total Recall" -- for which he won an Oscar -- "Journey" significantly improves on the old-style 3-D experience that required paper glasses with blue and red colored lenses. Here, you quite realistically get flying piranhas and a T-Rex snapping at -- and drooling on -- you as the underground adventure unfolds.

In this re-imagination of the tale first adapted as a Pat Boone feature in 1959 and subsequently in several made-for-TV versions, Brendan Fraser plays Trevor, a seismologist and professor whose scientist brother Max disappeared on an expedition years before. When Max's visiting teenage son (Josh Hutcherson) shows him an annotated copy of the Verne novel bearing directions to an underground portal in Iceland, uncle and nephew jet off to investigate, with the aid of a local guide (Anita Briem).

The Verne novel serves as a jumping off point rather than a template for the screenplay by Michael Weiss, Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, because as visionary as the tale was in the 19th century, "it's way out of date for today's audiences," Brevig explains. "Half the journey was just getting to Iceland, and they walk for months to the center of the earth . The fantastic part is when they're down there. So we kept the spirit of it but modernized it."

According to Brevig, who'd replaced another director on the project when it went 3-D, the story and characters evolved significantly before filming began in Montreal in June 2006. Post-production took more than a year due to pervasive CG elements, around 750 shots split between four visual effects houses. Those posed their own set of challenges, but with a shooting schedule of a mere 48 days, getting the complicated movie completed was equally difficult. Brevig explains why in the following sections, with additional input from actor Hutcherson and visual effects editor Ed Marsh.

Visual Arts

Featured creatures, locations and logistics.

"The idea was to present the audience with things that they've never seen before. Using modern visual effects tools and computer graphics , I can create an environment that's pretty much seamless," begins Brevig. "As the adventure progresses, things get more and more fantastic-a much heightened reality-- and that's echoed in the photography, the lighting and the color palette of the movie" he outlines.

That intensity is heightened in 3-D ; a process that involves filming images with two cameras simultaneously at a 90-degree angle using mirrors so that the viewer, wearing special glasses, sees a single three-dimensional image.

He assembled a team well versed in 3-D and digital HD filmmaking and tested all available systems before choosing the one pioneered by James Cameron and Vince Mason. " For 90 percent of the movie, we used a beam splitter camera. A beam splitter is a mirror that you can both see through and see reflections off of," he explains. "By mounting two cameras, or at least the lenses and the optical sensors from two cameras, onto this rig, you can adjust the lenses so they're different distances apart. For the big close-ups in the movie, I wanted the lenses to be very close together -- closer than the two lenses can fit. So by using this mirror rig, the lenses can appear to be 3/4 of an inch apart. This allows me to get big close-ups that don't hurt your eyes when you see the movie."

Brevig commissioned a compact version of the camera that mounted on a crane or a Steadicam , or used as a hand-held camera. "To my amazement, it worked from the first day through the end of photography. We had one hour of down time the entire production," he notes. But the 3-D format nevertheless presented other challenges after filming wrapped.

"Shots went through at least five or six iterations more than they would have for a regular film just to handle 3-D issues," comments Ed Marsh. "If you spend all day slaving over a tiny 24-inch monitor making the 3-D look perfect, don't be surprised when the image is projected onto a 40-foot theater screen and things aren't in the right place. You have actors embedding in the wall or you have those ducking objects that are way in front of them, or behind them. So you have to work big, early and often," by viewing footage on a large screen.

Because of limitations to the distance the eye can register 3-D, it's difficult to create an illusion of depth for objects more than 100 feet away. The filmmakers solved this by creating depth references, such as a rope in the climbing sequences, particles and bubbles in the water, and the flock of flying glow birds in the underground cavern that establish size and depth of the space. We'll give you the 411 on these and "Journey's" other CG creations in the next section.

• Having survived a "trial by fire" on "Journey," Eric Brevig is ready for whichever of several effects-heavy possibilities is scripted and ready to go first.
• Josh Hutcherson will play a vampire, "a hardcore bad guy" in "Cirque du Freak," and the now-catatonic survivor of a diner shooting in the indie drama "Winged Creatures."
• Ed Marsh recently completed work on the 2-D thriller "Eagle Eye," due out Sept. 26.
• Bren­dan Fraser stars in "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" opening Aug. 1, "Inkheart" due Jan. 9 and "G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra" slated for next August.

"The idea for a glowing bird had come up in one of the scripts prior to me coming on, and my idea was having these things swarm, to make it a magical moment," relates Eric Brevig. "There are shots where it looks like they're flying in the movie theater. Everybody reaches out and tries to grab one."

Computer-generated sequences like this were shot against a green screen , so the actors had to react to invisible objects that would be added later. "For the swarm shots I would just give them a place on the stage ceiling to look at, and for the close-up where the bird casts a glow onto Josh, we had a guy with a stick and a light bulb ," says Brevig.

Similar methodology was utilized for the giant albino Tyrannosaurus Rex, carnivorous plant and razor-toothed flying fish that menaced the characters. For the latter, the actors "were responding to blue Nerf footballs," notes Ed Marsh.

Brevig provided artwork and animatics -- cartoon versions -- of all the action scenes to show the actors how the scene would play. Nevertheless, 15-year-old Josh Hutcherson, who had helpful experience working with green screen on "Bridge to Terabithia" and "Zathura," found it difficult to react to "a big, terrifying dinosaur when in reality it's a little pink dot. But Eric did a really good job of drawing it out for us and giving us an idea of what it was going to look like in the end."

The dinosaur posed different problems for the designers. "By choosing to have a bright white albino dinosaur they were making the 3-D harder for themselves. They had to play with skin tones and textures to make it believable because it could look like it's not finished yet," explains Marsh. "So they spent a lot of time adding dirt and scarring to make it look more real. Then there was the drool issue -- how far could we push it," he says of the T-Rex saliva, noting that Brevig didn't want to go too far over the top, but "the studio wanted a big 3-D moment" -- and it got it.

As for the giant Venus flytrap that terrorizes Trevor, approval for the sequence was granted at the last minute, "So planning fell by the wayside," reveals Marsh. "We didn't have time to check the shots. It was literally two camera teams working for 18 hours with Brendan Fraser pantomiming the whole thing, with the grand hopes that we'd be able to clean it up in post. We spent a very long time figuring out how the plant should look and move, and changing that motion.

To Brevig, the most technically complex sequence was the raft getaway, "because water is very complex and challenging to simulate. There's ocean and fish and sea serpents, all CG, all interacting with each other and the actors." And, adds Marsh, "in 3-D, you can't cheat. The foam coming off the top of waves had to be rendered like foam coming off the top of waves. It required a much tighter tracking of every element and its position."

We'll discuss other tricky action sequences in the next section.

A couple of days in Iceland notwithstanding, "Journey" was mainly shot indoors on soundstages in Montreal , "so we were spared the weather issues," notes Brevig, who still had to work out how to build 40 sets on four stages, "knowing that we can't film and build on the same set at the same time. How do you change the lighting from an orange-lit desert to the blues and greens of the waterfall set without holding up the set builders below?" The solution? A pre-set lighting grid on a dimmer board that could be changed with the push of a button. "It probably saved us two weeks' production time."

Since big action set pieces are time-consuming to shoot, even with animatic blueprints as guidelines, Brevig "had two 3-D rigs so we would shoot two shots at a time, giving me more editorial coverage and a faster pace. I made a still frame grab of every shot and put them up on boards on the set in shooting order. We'd take them off one by one as we shot the sequences," he details.

His team had only one night to shoot an underwater sequence at the Olympic Stadium pool in Montreal, so "safety divers getting in the shot" were the least of his worries. But advance planning on the lighting end and not having to reload the digital camera allowed him to finish in seven hours.

Several physically demanding scenes involved suspending actors in midair in harnesses while they delivered dialogue. They were shot against a blue screen for part of the free-fall to the center of the earth, except for the portion where the camera is looking up at them. "We put the actors on their sides and we'd dolly past them with the camera on its side," Brevig explains.

He used a similar low-tech method for the waterfall scene, placing the stars on a 50-foot table covered in black plastic. "We went out in the parking lot at night, aimed fire hoses up the table and dragged the actors by wires on their feet. We put the camera on its side so it looks like it's vertical."

Josh Hutcherson enjoyed doing "as much as they'd let me do" stunt-wise, including rock climbing and the sequence where he shoots into the air on a giant kite. He was spared injuries, but Fraser incurred several, including a burned hand from getting too close to an exploding magnesium flare.

"That was day three of shooting and we had to shut down for two days. Not that I wished it on him, but it allowed me 36 hours to go to Iceland and scout locations," notes Brevig, adding that Fraser hurt his back later on. "He was on a big rig and a got smacked in the tailbone. He took the brunt of the injuries, but everyone got scrapes and bruises from brushing against concrete and plaster."

Such SNAFUs aside, "Journey" came in well under its $70 million budget, according to Brevig, who'd happily direct a sequel -- mention of the search for the lost city of Atlantis was included precisely for that reason, he says. "I'd do it in a heartbeat," Hutcherson concurs.

­For more information on this movie, 3-D formats and related topics, journey over to the next page.

Lots more information

Related howstuffworks articles.

• How Digital 3-D Works
• How 3-D Glasses Work
• How Computer Animation Works
• How CFX3 Works

More Great Links

• Journey to the Center of the Earth -- Official Site
• Eric Brevig and Josh Hutcherson interviewed June 20, 2008
• Ed Marsh interviewed June 23, 2008

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Fantasy & Sci-Fi

Journey to the center of the earth (hbo).

: Brendan Fraser leads a trio of explorers on a trip to Earth's core in this stunning adaptation of Jules Verne's sci-fi classic.

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Jules Verne's science-fiction classic is brought to stunning life in this epic adventure about a trio of explorers who discover a pathway to Earth's core. Brendan Fraser.

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Starring: Brendan Fraser , Josh Hutcherson , Anita Briem

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Journey to the Center of the Earth

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Alexander "Alec" McKuen

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Count Saknussem

A fanciful sci-fi tale for the whole family.

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© 1959 Joseph M. Schenck Enterprises, Inc. and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Renewed 1987 Joseph M. Schenck Enterprises, Inc. and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

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The Core of Truth in Journey to the Center of the Earth

The latest cinematic version of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth opens this Friday, staring the ever-likeable Brendan Frasier. Frasier's character, (Professor Trever Anderson), his nephew and local Icelandic guide find themselves having hair-raising adventures as they voyage through underground seas and landscapes populated with all manner of bizzare plants and animals. Verne's original book was published in 1864, a time when quite a few people took very seriously the idea that the Earth was hollow--and inhabited. In this they were inspired by a scientific proposal by Edmund Halley (of Halley's comet fame) that turned out to be not completely off the mark.

As described by David Standish in his entertaining book Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth’s Surface , before Halley, most people assumed that the Earth underfoot was pretty much solid rock all the way through, with some lava and water thrown for good measure. In the late 17th century, Halley was interesed in observations that showed that the Earth's magnetic poles wandered around. To explain this motion, Halley suggested that the Earth wasn't solid, but instead composed of a series of concentric shells. One or more of these shells produced the Earth's magnetic field, and its movement relative to our, outermost, shell resulted in the changes to the position of the magentic poles. Halley further went on to suggest that each of these shells could be inhabited.

The "inhabited" notion went on to provoke quite a bit of science fiction, as well as some real attempts to find an entrance to these inner worlds and get at their postulated wealth, but otherwise turned out to be a dud. But Halley's basic idea that the Earth wasn't a homogenous block of rock, but instead had a structure in the form of moving concentric spherical shells, ultimately did find expression in our modern understanding of Earth.

We now know our planet is composed of a thin outer crust wrapped around a thick mantle, which is in turn wrapped around a liquid outer core of molten rock, at the heart of which is the Earth's solid inner core. Circulating electrical currents within the outer core gives rise to the Earth's magnetic field and are responsible for the slow motion of the magnetic poles. It's also believed that Earth's inner core is "superrotating" -- that is, turning faster on the Earth's axis than the surface --and this rotation may also play a part in maintaining Earth's maganetic field. So while the movie may be pure fantasy, its worth remembering a time when even the suggestion that we could really know what the center of the Earth is like was a fantastic thought.

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Journey to the Center of the Earth

• On a quest to find out what happened to his missing brother, a scientist, his nephew and their mountain guide discover a fantastic and dangerous lost world in the center of the earth.
• Professor Trevor Anderson receives his teenager nephew Sean Anderson. He will spend ten days with his uncle while his mother, Elizabeth, prepares to move to Canada. She gives a box to Trevor that belonged to his missing brother, Max, and Trevor find a book with references to the last journey of his brother. He decides to follow the steps of Max with Sean and they travel to Iceland, where they meet the guide Hannah Ásgeirsson. While climbing a mountain, there is a thunderstorm and they protect themselves in a cave. However, lightening collapses the entrance and the trio is trapped in the cave. They seek an exit and fall in a hole, discovering a lost world in the center of the Earth. — Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Science professor Trevor Anderson wasn't prepared to mind his teen nephew Sean ten days, while the kid's mother prepares their move to Canada. She stumbled across a box belonging to the knave's father, Trevor's brother Max, who went missing years ago. It contains a journal documenting his last journey, which happens to go to the very volcanic region in Iceland which Trevor's research, set up with Max, flashes as most notable. he decides to travel there and Sean insists to come along. They need a local guide and hire Hannah Ásgeirsson, who proves quite practical, while the Andersons provide ingenuity and bravado. Seeking shelter for a storm in a collapsing cave, they descend trough a volcanic exit into a road to the center of the world, and find it has its distinct fauna and flora, partially dinosaur-ancient, which adds to the dangers posed by the elements as they must seek a way out, which seems hopeless. — KGF Vissers
• A scientist, his nephew, and a travel guide travel to explore the discoveries and mysteries that are in the centre of the Earth. Through their adventure, they begin to learn all the secrets that are hidden in the world and gain more understanding of the sciences. — RECB3
• Journey to the Centre of the Earth is a science fantasy action-adventure movie. In this movie, the main characters are Trevor Anderson, Sean Anderson, Max Anderson, Hannah, Elizabeth. So, the synopsis of this movie is as follows. Trevor Anderson is a volcanologist and teaches the student in the university also. At the work, Trevor found that his brother's lab is being shut down because of a lack of funding. So, he comes home and sits in a chair to relax and found some messages on the answering machine. When he plays that recording, he found that the messages are from Liz (Max's wife and Sean's mother). He is forgotten that his nephew Sean is coming to spend some days with him. When Liz drops Sean, she leaves Trevor with a box of items that belonged to Max (Trevor's brother and Sean's father) who disappeared years before. Sean takes interest when Trevor says about his father, whom he never really had a chance to meet. Inside the box, Trevor discovers a couple of things. In that, he found the novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne. Inside the book, he finds notes written by his brother. So, he goes to his laboratory to find out more information on the notes. There he decides that he must go to Iceland to investigate further. He decides to send Sean back to his mother, but Sean protest it, so he decides to bring Sean with him. They started looking for another volcanologist. When they get to that scientist, they meet his daughter Hannah, who informs them he is dead. She tells them that both her father and Max believed in that book. After some discussion, she offers to help them climb up to the instrument which suddenly started sending data. While hiking the mountain a lightning storm arrives and forces three of them into a cave. Because the lightning storm hit the cave, its entrance got collapses and trapping them inside the cave. So, they do not have any alternative way except to go deeper into the cave, which turns out in an abandoned mine. So, the three of them decide to go deeper into the cave to investigate for Hannah farther and Max into the mine. Suddenly they found a hole in a wall after hitting a trolly on the dead-end of the mine. While investigating the fall into a deep pit, taking them to the "Centre of the Earth". They all continue the travel until they discover a cave that Max lived in. They found some old journal of Max, meanwhile, Hannah discovers Max's dead body. So, they all bury him. At that point, Trevor reads a message from the journal that was written by Max on Sean's 3rd birthday. While reading Max's journal they realize that they must quickly leave, as the temperature is continuously increasing. Trevor figures out that they must find a steam power that can send them to the surface, and it must be done in 48 hours, or all of the water which creates the steam will be gone. Also, must do this before the temperature rises past 135 degrees. They begin by crossing the underground ocean, and suddenly the Trevor and Hannah got separated from Sean. So now Sean's guide is a little bird who has been present since the three of them entered the Centre. After Sean comes closer to the river, he encounters a Tyrannosaurus. Trevor who is searching for him saves by digging a hole in the wall and putting the Tyrannosaurus in a big hole. When they arrive at the river, they found it is dried up and all the water is on the other side of a wall. Trevor uses a flare to fire the magnesium in the wall and take out the water to create a powerful steam pressure to shoot them outside that place. When they throw out from that pit and destroy the home of an Italian man, they found that it was Italy where they have landed. Sean gives him a diamond (which he had found earlier in the caves) for the penalty of the destroyed house. Trevor founds that Sean has many more in his backpack, and they can be used for funding his brother's laboratory. At the end of this movie, Trevor hand over a book titled "Atlantis" on the final day of Sean's visit with him (and Hannah), suggesting they could hang out during Christmas break.

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Journey to the Center of the Earth Mass Market Paperback – June 5, 2012

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Signet
• Publication date June 5, 2012
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 4.15 x 0.83 x 6.86 inches
• ISBN-10 9780451532152
• ISBN-13 978-0451532152
• Lexile measure 620L
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0451532155
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Signet; Reprint edition (June 5, 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780451532152
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0451532152
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 620L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.15 x 0.83 x 6.86 inches
• #3,014 in Teen & Young Adult Classic Literature
• #36,809 in Science Fiction Adventures
• #51,505 in Classic Literature & Fiction

About the authors

Jules verne.

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was a French author best known for his tales of adventure, including Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days. A true visionary, Verne foresaw the skyscraper, the submarine, and the airplane, among many other inventions, and is now regarded as one of the fathers of science fiction.

Frank Wynne

FRANK WYNNE has translated over fifty works from French and Spanish by authors including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Ahmadou Kourouma, Tomás González and Arturo Pérez-Reverte. In the course of his career, his translations have earned him the IMPAC Prize for Atomised by Michel Houellebecq (2002), the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2005), and he has twice been awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation in 2008 and most recently in 2016 for Harraga by Boualem Sansal. He is a two-time winner of the Premio Valle Inclán, for Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras (2012) and for The Blue Hour by Alonso Cueto (2014). His translations have been awarded the CWA International Dagger in three consecutive years. He has spent time as translator in residence at the Villa Gillet in Lyons and at the Santa Maddalena Foundation.

Paper Mill Press

Paper Mill Press is proud to present a timeless collection of unabridged literary classics to a twenty-first century audience. Each original master work is reimagined into a sophisticated yet modern format with custom suede-like metallic foiled covers.

Hello, my name is John Joel, still single.

I'm a author, freelancer, entrepreneur, content creator, proficient in writing, am from Abia state, Nigeria. I write in all the genres of literature. However, children's fiction and inspiration are two categories in which are particularly enjoy writing.

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'This is a journey, not a destination': Stunning map of the Milky Way's center exposes new mysteries about our galaxy

A stunning new map of the magnetic fields at the Milky Way's center charts never-before-seen features, and raises new questions about how our galaxy's central engine works.

The Milky Way is our home galaxy, but how well do we actually know it? As part of a NASA-funded project, a team led by Villanova University researchers has obtained a never-before-seen view of the central engine at the heart of our galaxy.

The new map of this central region of the Milky Way, which took four years to assemble, reveals the relationship between magnetic fields at the heart of our galaxy and the cold dust structures that dwell there. This dust forms the building blocks of stars, planets, and, ultimately, life as we know it. The central engine of the  Milky Way  drives this process.

That means a clearer picture of dust and magnetic interactions builds a better understanding of the Milky Way and our place within it. The team's findings also have implications beyond our galaxy, offering glimpses of how dust and magnetic fields interact in the central engines of other galaxies.

Understanding how stars and galaxies form and evolve is a vital part of the origin story of life — but, until now, the interaction of dust and magnetic fields in this process has been somewhat overlooked, especially within our own galaxy.

"The center of the Milky Way and most of the space between stars is filled with a lot of dust, and this is important for our galaxy's life cycle," David Chuss, research team leader and a physics professor at Villanova University, told Space.com. "What we looked at was light emitted from these cool dust grains produced by heavy elements forged in stars and dispersed when those stars die and explode."

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A complicated picture of Milky Way magnetic fields

In the heart of the Milky Way exists a region called the central molecular zone, which is packed with an estimated 60 million solar masses of dust. This vast reservoir of dust has a temperature of around minus 432.7 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 258. 2 degrees Celsius). That's just a few degrees above absolute zero (minus 460 Fahrenheit), the hypothetical temperature at which all atomic movement would cease.

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Also located at the heart of the Milky Way is hotter gas that has been stripped of its electrons, or "ionized," and exists as a state of matter called "plasma."

"Radio wave observations of this region have these beautiful vertical elements in them that trace magnetic fields in the hot, ionized plasma component of the center of the Milky Way," Chuss said. "We tried to figure out what relationship this has to the cool dust component.

The team also wanted to know how this cool dust aligns with the magnetic fields at the heart of the Milky Way, which would also reveal how these magnetic fields are orientated. Such orientation is referred to as their "polarization."

Chuss and colleagues received funding from NASA to investigate this dusty central zone using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which was a telescope that circled the globe at an altitude of 45,000 feet (13,716 meters) aboard a Boeing 747 plane.

The project's Far-Infrared Polarimetric Large Area CMZ Exploration (FIREPLACE) created an infrared map that spans around 500 light-years across the center of the Milky Way over nine flights.

Using measurements of the polarization of the radiation emitted from dust that is aligned with magnetic fields, the intricate structure of those magnetic fields themselves was inferred by the team. This was then overlaid onto a three-color map that shows warm dust with a pink hue and cool dust clouds in blue. The image also shows radio-wave-emitting filaments in yellow.

"This is a journey, not a destination, but what we've found is this is a very complicated thing. The directions of the magnetic field vary all across the clouds at the center of the Milky Way," Chuss explained. "This is the first step in trying to figure out how the field that we see in the radio waves across these large organized filaments may relate to the rest of the dynamics of the center of the Milky Way."

Chuss explained that this complicated picture of magnetic fields was something that he and the FIREPLACE team had expected to see with the new SOFIA map; the observations agreed with smaller-scale infrared and radio wave observations previously made of the heart of the Milky Way. Where this new map, however, really comes into its own is the sheer scale. It manages to reveal some never-before mapped regions. The fine detail woven into it is stunning as well.

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"I think we have a lot of work to do to ultimately come up with the conclusions here. One of the things that I think is interesting about it is some of the fields appear to be in the same direction as the filaments in the radio waves, and some of them appear to be consistent with the direction of the dust further out in the disk," Chuss said. "It's a tantalizing hint that maybe the large-scale field in the disk of our galaxy and the vertical field that we've noticed in the center of the Milky Way are connected."

He and the team will continue to analyze the SOFIA data over the course of the next two years, and he hopes that this work will inspire theorists to come up with some new models to explain what is happening at the heart of our galaxy.

A preprint version of the SOFIA data is published on the paper repository  arXiv .

Originally posted on Space.com .

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. who specializes in science, space, physics, astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, quantum mechanics and technology. Rob's articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University

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