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August 6, 2019 10:00 am
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/WQRa6ldtVpw/best-milky-way-map-yet-confirms-our-galaxy-is-warped-and-twisted
Best Milky Way Map Yet Confirms Our Galaxy Is Warped and Twisted
Astronomers from the U.S. and Europe have put together a new 3D model of the galaxy based on the distance between stars and found that our galaxy is warped and twisted. "I'd say that it is shaped like a Pringle," said study co-author Radek Poleski, an astronomer at Ohio State University in Columbus. CNET reports: The research, published Thursday in the journal Science, draws on a population of stars known as the Cepheids, which are pulsing, massive, young stars that shine brighter than the sun. Using data from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), a sky survey run by the University of Warsaw out of Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, astronomers were able to pick out 2,431 of the Cepheids through the thick gas and dust of the Milky Way and use them to make a map of the galaxy. Dorota Skowron, lead author on the study and astronomer with Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, says the OGLE project observed the galactic disk of the Milky Way for six years, taking 206,726 images of the sky containing 1,055,030,021 stars. Within, they found the population of Cepheids, which are particularly useful for plotting a map because their brightness fluctuates over time. Using that fluctuation, the team produced a 3D model of the galaxy, confirming work that previously demonstrated the galaxy was flared at its edges. They were also able to determine the age of the Cepheid population, with younger stars located closer to the center of the galactic disk and older stars positioned farther away, near the edge. By simulating star formation in the early Milky Way, the team showed how the galaxy might have evolved over the last 175 million years, with bursts of star formation in the spiral arms resulting in the current distribution of Cepheids ranging from 20 million to 260 million years old.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/WQRa6ldtVpw/best-milky-way-map-yet-confirms-our-galaxy-is-warped-and-twisted
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