It’s Not Just You — The Galaxy IS Warped, After All!
The Milky Way is warped at its edges according to the first detailed 3-D map made of our home galaxy. The idea that we live in a thin, flat spiral galaxy now needs to be supplanted by a more interesting, and complex, idea of a disk twisted at its ends.
Macquarie University researchers, together with investigators from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, used the positions of 1,339 stars to create the new map. This model revealed the galaxy is mostly flat near the center, becoming more warped toward the edges.
“We usually think of spiral galaxies as being quite flat, like Andromeda which you can easily see through a telescope,” said Professor Richard de Grijs, astronomer from Macquarie University.
For 50 years, astronomers have seen evidence that clouds of hydrogen in the Milky Way Galaxy were located in a warped pattern. For this study, astronomers examined data showing the locations of classical Cepheid stars, each up to 20 times more massive, and 100,000 times brighter, than our Sun. These hot, short-lived, stellar bodies are typically used by astronomers measuring distances to groups of stars. The information utilized for this new map was collected by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a NASA telescope launched in December 2009.
