The Milky Way Does Not Look Like Humanity

The Milky Way was not what we had imagined / Hubble

According to human perceptions of galaxies in the If you look at the Milky Way from afar, you can see the bright center around which a large disc of stars and gas, which all have a relatively flat and stable shape.

However, scientists have posed Researchers at the Australian University of Macquarie and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have made their discovery by creating a new 3D map of the Milky Way that could better identify the shape of the galaxy

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"Usually we imagine flat spiral galaxies like Andromeda, which we can easily see in a telescope ", said his co-author Richard where G.

However, it is not so easy to reproduce the shape of the galaxy when it is found in it.

"It is extremely difficult to calculate the distance between the Sun and the points in the Milky Way external gas disk without the slightest idea of ​​what is actually a similar disk of the galaxy," – said Chinese scientist Chen Xiaonding

To create their 3D map, scientists used the 1,339 large pulsating stars known as classical Cepheids, 20 times more massive than the Sun and 100,000 times brighter. By calculating the duration of their pulsation periods, astronomers were able to accurately calculate their distance. Distance to stars was used as a marker to determine the boundaries of the rest of the galaxy and even its edges.

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As a result, scientists concluded that Hydrogen gas on the edges of the galaxy is not not a thin plane. The disc would look like a distortion in the form of the letter "S" s – it was seen from afar.

"We found that the S-shaped disk is deformed to form a spiral pattern that is more and more spiral," De Gray said.

According to researchers, this shape can be the result of a large rotational force produced by the massive internal disk of the galaxy.