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posted by martyb on Sunday January 12 2020, @11:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the jumpin-jack-flash... dept.

The Milky Way's spiral arm that's home to our Solar System has been found to cradle the largest gaseous structure in the galaxy – a long, thin strip of jumbled star-forming matter measuring 9,000 light-years long and 400 light-years wide.

A team of researchers published details of their discovery in Nature this week. Named the Radcliffe Wave, after the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where the study was led, the structure had never been observed before and overturns 150 years of cosmological theory.

"No astronomer expected that we live next to a giant, wave-like collection of gas - or that it forms the local arm of the Milky Way," said Alyssa Goodman, co-author of the paper and professor of applied astronomy at America's Harvard University.

Although the structure is giant - taking up nearly all of the space in what is known as the Orion Arm, or Local Arm, of the Milky Way - it was difficult to find. Scientists only spotted the giant thread of gas after mapping the smattering of young stars being born within that area when they analysed the data recorded by the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft, which launched in 2013.

"Only within the last year or two have we obtained super accurate distance to these stellar nurseries, enabled by novel statistical analyses of Gaia data. It is not possible to see this structure on the sky," Catherine Zucker, co-author of the paper and a graduate student at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told The Register.

[...] "It appears that the Sun, on its galactic orbit, crossed the Radcliffe Wave 13 million years ago, and may cross it again in the future. So in a way we are 'surfing' the wave," said Zucker.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday January 12 2020, @02:10PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Sunday January 12 2020, @02:10PM (#942496) Journal

    I wonder if an existing star that passes through a gas cloud can inhale enough gas to significantly increase its size, maybe move up a class?

    It's too easy to think of things as generally fixed and unchanging, or at the least so slowly changing as to be effectively unchanging. Stars can change by a mass exchange between the members of a binary pair. Or by a merger. Stellar mergers produce wondrously weird stuff, such as a Thorne-Zytkow star, which is a red giant with a neutron star in its core.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @05:22PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @05:22PM (#942519)

    I thought The Register closed up shop and I'd never have to hear the word boffin again unless talking about bird. Was it some other site that closed? If so, I'm fucking annoyed.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @05:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @05:39PM (#942523)

    That's millennial talk for "we massaged the data until it fit our preconceived theory". Also, irony alert in the statement: "Only within the last year or two have we obtained super accurate distance to these stellar nurseries"... if you can't define a short time period within 100%, why should anyone believe you can measure distances *super* accurately.

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