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Scientists have discovered a strange “break” in the galactic spiral arms of our Milky Way that could tell us more about its galactic history.
NASA combines young stars and regions of gas from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as if it were a “shard sticking out of a plank of wood” from the plane of the arms of the Milky Way spiral galaxy .
Finding the functionality was a feat in itself, as Earth sits in the Milky Way. In a statement, JPL officials said the difficulty in conducting such research was a bit like standing in Times Square while trying to map the island of Manhattan.
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Researchers followed the feature using infrared or heat-seeking eyes for NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (before the observatory retired in January 2020) and the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which measures distances and stellar movements. Gaia’s most recent major data release was in July.
The new study focused on an area close to one of the Milky Way’s arms, called the Sagittarius arm – the home of the famous. The Pillars of Creation The stacks of stars that are part of the Eagle Nebula (Messier 16.) Between Spitzer and Gaia, the data collected showed that the arc is full of young stars moving in space , with roughly the same speed and direction.
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“The main property of spiral arms is how closely they wrap around a galaxy,” Michael Kuhn, astrophysicist at Caltech and lead author of the new research paper, said in the JPL statement.
Cohn added that previous models of the Milky Way suggested rotation, which was measured with an angle of tilt relative to a perfect 0-degree circle, and previously suggested that the arc has an angle of tilt of approximately 12 degrees. The new observations show that the angle of inclination of the arc is approaching 60 degrees. But why is still not clear.
Astronomers are still trying to figure out how and why galactic arms form, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has said the new study may provide clues. Since the stars of the newly discovered entity formed around the same time and in the same region, it is likely that they were affected by larger changes occurring in the Milky Way. These changes include the gravitational and shear changes associated with the rotation of the galaxy.
“This structure is a small part of the Milky Way, but it can tell us something important about the galaxy as a whole,” said co-author Robert Benjamin, astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater, in the same release.
Benjamin is also the principal investigator of the Catalog of the Galaxy Extraordinary Infrared Survey (GLIMPSE), which the new study also used. GLIMPSE includes approximately 100,000 newborn stars discovered by Spitzer during his lifetime.
A peer-reviewed study based on the research is published in the July 2021 issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
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