The Milky Way is in a twist reveals 3D map of our galaxy
The first accurate 3D map of our galaxy reveals that it is warped and twisted.
Milky Way’s disc of stars becomes increasingly ‘warped’ and twisted the further away the stars are from the galaxy’s centre, astronomers from Macquarie University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found. The team used 1339 ‘standard’ stars to map the real shape of our home galaxy in a paper published in Nature Astronomy today.
From a great distance, our galaxy would look like a thin disk of stars that orbit once every few hundred million years around its central region, where hundreds of billions of stars, together with a huge mass of dark matter, provide the gravitational ‘glue’ to hold it all together.
But the pull of gravity becomes weaker far away from the Milky Way’s inner regions. In the galaxy’s far outer disk, the hydrogen atoms making up most of the Milky Way’s gas disk are no longer confined to a thin plane, but they give the disk an S-like warped appearance.
Professor Richard de Grijs, co-author of the paper and an astronomer from Macquarie University in…
