Romanian Space Agency | 2017 Jul 28
[img3="An all-sky image of the Milky Way, as observed by the Planck Space Observatory in the infrared. The data contained in this image were used in the current research and were essential in constraining the results for the light energy of our Galaxy.In a research breakthrough, a team of scientists has for the first time derived a complete picture of the distribution of all light energy contained within our Galaxy. ...
Credit: ESA, Planck HFI and LFI Consortia"]http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/imag ... mage_2.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
Ever since our ancestors raised their eyes to the dark sky, the glow of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, has been a source of inspiration. What we see as a band of fuzzy light on the night sky from dark locations is nothing but the disk of the galaxy where our Sun resides. But what would we see if we were able to travel towards the centre of the Milky Way? What would an alien civilisation living at the opposite end of our galaxy see? All these questions can now be answered thanks to a recent research study that predicts the variation with position of the glow inside the Milky Way.
Through this new study, researchers wanted to understand what is the make-up of our Galaxy, which in turn, can give us unique insight into how stars in galaxies in general form and evolve over cosmic time. To do this they aimed to build a picture of how photons emitted by stars in our Galaxy are distributed in energy and space throughout the Milky Way. This process was challenging for several reasons: we have not yet detected the large majority of stars in our Galaxy that produce the photons; stellar photons are continuously absorbed or scattered by interstellar dust which redistributes their energy and direction of propagation; it was not fully understood how the interstellar dust is distributed in space, its amount or properties. ...
A radiation transfer model for the Milky-Way: I. Radiation fields
and application to High Energy Astrophysics - C. C. Popescu et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 470(3):2539 (Sep 2017) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stx1282
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1705.06652 > 18 May 2017