Science in Public: The Milky Way Is Warped
Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 6:43 pm
The Milky Way Is Warped
Science in Public | 2019 Feb 05
An Intuitive 3D Map of the Galactic Warp’s Precession Traced by Classical Cepheids ~ Xiaodian Chen et al
Science in Public | 2019 Feb 05
The first accurate 3D map of our galaxy reveals its true shape: warped and twisted.
Astronomers from Macquarie University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have used 1339 ‘standard’ stars to map the real shape of our home galaxy ...
They found the Milky Way’s disc of stars becomes increasingly ‘warped’ and twisted the further away the stars are from the galaxy’s centre. ...
Trying to determine the real shape of our galaxy is like standing in a Sydney garden and trying to determine the shape of Australia. But, for the past 50 years there have been indications that the hydrogen clouds in the Milky Way are warped. The new map shows that the warped Milky Way disc also contains young stars. It confirms that the warped spiral pattern is caused by torque from the spinning of the Milky Way’s massive inner disc of stars. ...
The team built their map using 1339 large pulsating stars each up to 100,000 brighter than our sun. Data on these classical Cepheid stars were provided by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).
Astronomers have observed a dozen other galaxies which showed similar progressively twisted spiral patterns in their outer regions. So our Milky Way’s twists are rare but not unique. ...
An Intuitive 3D Map of the Galactic Warp’s Precession Traced by Classical Cepheids ~ Xiaodian Chen et al
- Nature Astronomy (online 04 Feb 2019) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0686-7
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1902.00998 > 04 Feb 2019