As the central mass spins, it creates strong torques, or rotational forces, on the outer regions, which gives it the twisted shape. But the further out you go, the weaker that influence gets, so things can drift away a little. Billions and billions of stars reside there – along with a huge helping of dark matter – and the gravity of that enormous mass holds the galaxy together. The researchers attribute this pattern to the gravitational influence of the galactic center. ![]() Perhaps more importantly, in the Milky Way's outer regions, we found that the S-like stellar disk is warped in a progressively twisted spiral pattern." "This offers new insights into the formation of our home galaxy. "Somewhat to our surprise, we found that in 3D, our collection of 1,339 Cepheid stars and the Milky Way's gas disk follow each other closely," says Richard de Grijs, co-author of the paper. ![]() This seems to be true not just for the galaxy's stars but the disk of hydrogen gas as well. When they plotted these stars out on a 3D map, the researchers found that instead of being arranged in a flat disk they twist upwards at one end and down at the other, creating a kind of stretched out S shape. That brightness tends to pulse in a regular pattern on a scale of days or weeks, and astronomers can use that to estimate their distance to within three to five percent.įor the new study the team examined 1,339 Cepheid stars, the data for which came from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). To develop a new map, the researchers looked to a group of stars known as classical Cepheids, which can be up to 20 times more massive than the Sun and 100,000 times brighter. But now astronomers from Macquarie University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have created a more accurate 3D map of the galaxy and found that it's more warped and twisted than previously thought.įrom our position in the wings of the Milky Way, it's hard to get an idea of exactly what shape the galaxy is. Conventional wisdom has long held that the Milky Way was more or less a flat disk of stars and gas, with a bulge in the middle.
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