JPL: X Marks the Spot for Milky Way Formation

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JPL: X Marks the Spot for Milky Way Formation

Post by bystander » Wed Jul 20, 2016 3:52 am

X Marks the Spot for Milky Way Formation
NASA | JPL-Caltech | WISE | 2016 July 19
[img3="Researchers used data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)
mission to highlight the X-shaped structure in the bulge of the Milky Way.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/D.Lang
"]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/ima ... _hires.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
A new understanding of our galaxy's structure began in an unlikely way: on Twitter. A research effort sparked by tweets led scientists to confirm that the Milky Way's central bulge of stars forms an "X" shape. The newly published study uses data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

The unconventional collaboration started in May 2015 when Dustin Lang, an astronomer at the Dunlap Institute of the University of Toronto, posted galaxy maps to Twitter, using data from WISE's two infrared surveys of the entire sky in 2010. Infrared light allows astronomers to see the structures of galaxies in spite of dust, which blocks crucial details in visible light. Lang was using the WISE data in a project to map the web of galaxies far outside our Milky Way, which he made available through an interactive website.

But it was the Milky Way's appearance in the tweets that got the attention of other astronomers. Some chimed in about the appearance of the bulge, a football-shaped central structure that is three-dimensional compared to the galaxy's flat disk. Within the bulge, the WISE data seemed to show a surprising X structure, which had never been as clearly demonstrated before in the Milky Way. Melissa Ness, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, recognized the significance of the X shape, and contacted Lang.

The two met a few weeks later at a conference in Michigan, and decided to collaborate on analyzing the bulge using Lang's WISE maps. Their work resulted in a new study published in the Astronomical Journal confirming an X-shaped distribution of stars in the bulge. ...

X Marks the Spot at the Centre of the Milky Way Galaxy
Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics | University of Toronto | 2016 July 19

The X-shaped Bulge of the Milky Way revealed by WISE - Melissa Ness, Dustin Lang
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