SPIRAL ARM “BREAK”
An oddity is discovered in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms
Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have spotted a “break” in one of its spiral arms
A galactic view of this corner of the universe where we are located highlights the fact that we are no more than a speck of dust on the cosmic scale — a pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan put it. Moving out, a galaxy is a collection of stars planets, and all known matter held together by the gravitational force and the mysterious dark matter. There are three main types of galaxies — Spiral, Elliptical & Irregular. Our very own Milky Way galaxy is a spiral galaxy.
Spiral galaxies are the most common type consisting of large rotating disks of stars surrounded by a shell of dark matter. They have supermassive black holes at their centers. Milky Way is pictured above with its long spiral arms. Although we have a fair idea about the large-scale structure of our galaxy — including the size and shape of the Milky Way’s arms, much still remains a mystery.
Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope prior to its retirement in January 2020, astronomers spotted a previously unrecognized feature of our Milky Way galaxy — a collection of young stars and star-forming gas clouds is sticking out of one…
