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Astronomers have discovered a huge new filament of gas and dust hanging from the outer edge of our galaxy. Dubbed “Cattail,” the feature is not yet fully mapped, and the team that found it believe it could be a hitherto unknown arm of our Milky Way galaxy.
The Milky Way is a giant spiral galaxy, which has a central bulge surrounded by coiled arms containing stars, gas, and dust. Our original galaxy has four known spiral arms – two major arms named Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus, and two minor arms squashed between them named Norma and Sagittarius, according to NASA. The Earth is on a branch of the arm of Sagittarius called the Spur of Orion.
In recent years, researchers from the world’s largest radio telescope, the Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou Province, China, have carried out systematic studies of a region of the sky known as Cygnus-X’s name, Keping Qiu, an astronomer from Nanjing University, told Live Science.
Related: 11 fascinating facts about our Milky Way galaxy
FAST sees the universe through the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and is therefore particularly useful for observing clouds of cold gases containing hydrogen, Qiu added. Observing Cygnus-X, which is a huge star-forming region about 4,500 light-years away, Qiu and his colleagues noticed clouds of hydrogen gas that appeared to be far behind.
By combining the FAST observations with data from a telescope in Germany and another in Australia, the researchers were able to map the feature, which spans nearly 3,600 light years at a distance of about 68,000 light years from Earth, making it the largest and most distant giant gas filament ever.
The team estimated that Cattail contains as much mass as 65,000 suns, and its true extent could be even greater, perhaps as long as 16,000 light years in diameter. They detailed their findings in an August 4 article published in the arXiv preprint database which was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The distaff is found at the outer edge of the Milky Way, located about three times farther from the galactic center than we are. Most of our galaxy’s mass is closer to the center, which makes the huge feature a bit of a puzzle.
“We don’t know how such a huge filamentary gas structure could form in such an extreme location,” Qiu said.
As of now, he and his colleagues are unable to determine if Cattail is a self-contained gas filament or if it coils and connects to the main part of the Milky Way somewhere. It could be a previously unknown arm or a branch of one of the four main arms, Qiu said.
Many questions remain about the functionality. We think our galaxy is distorted on its edges, but Cattail doesn’t seem to follow the same distorted pattern, Qiu said. He and his team intend to further study the filament with FAST in order to better understand it.
“It reminds me that there is a lot of things we don’t know about the Milky Way,” Felix J. Lockman, an astronomer at Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia who was not involved in, told Live Science. the works. “Every time we seem to look deep, there’s more information in there.”
Because FAST offers better resolution than previous radio telescopes, Cattail could be a part of the galaxy that just hasn’t been noticed before, he added. The fact that the feature does not appear to follow the galactic chain in the region is odd, Lockman said, although the exact details of the chain are still a matter of debate.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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