2023-05-21 23:46:24
The shape of the Milky Way was long thought to branch into four arms, but scientists now believe it consists of only two armed spirals.
Written by Sean Thiessen | published
Scientists change the shape of the galaxy. Or at least they understand it. According to a report before Espace.comA team of researchers used data from advanced telescopes and other instruments to map the shape of the Milky Way, and they theorized that it is a spiral with two arms, contrary to the previous belief that it had four arms.
The recent study determined that any galaxy is likely to be elliptical, irregular or spiral shaped. Spiral galaxies are the most common, and they usually have two main arms that branch off from the center and branch off into smaller arms.
The Milky Way has long been thought to be a strange exception to this common shape. Scientists previously assumed that our galaxy is a spiral with four main arms extending from a cluster of stars in the center.
Although many believe that the Milky Way has a special place in this regard, why it formed this unique shape has remained a mystery. The new data indicates that the Milky Way may not be distinct at all. Astronomers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences at Purple Mountain and the National Astronomical Observatories studied data from multiple sources to build a new model of the galaxy.
The team measured the distances between about 200 stars in the Milky Way to create a map of the galaxy. They combined this data with measurements from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope. They focused the telescope’s readings on more than 1,000 galaxy clusters and 24,000 OB stars.
These large stars burn hot, bright, and fast, which means they move very little during their lives and are relatively easy to track. The team measured the motion of the stars relative to Earth to help detail their new model of the galaxy. The theory the team came up with is that the Milky Way has a dense band running through its center from which two main arms branch off.
At the edges of the galaxy are fragmented arms unrelated to the dense star cluster at its centre. These fragmented arms are thought to be the result of galaxy collisions deep in the Milky Way’s history. When our galaxy collided with another, or perhaps several others, the fragmentation would have occurred and created the shape that scientists are now determining.
The team admits that this new model of the galaxy is incomplete. They will continue to add data from other sources and ongoing discoveries from Gaia, which should be active for at least another two years.
The methods that led the research team to the spiral-armed model of the Milky Way could change the way scientists approach modeling galaxies at all scales. The process of determining galactic structure sheds new light on the shape of our own galaxy, and may continue to shed light on other mysteries as well.
As scientists continue to solve the mysteries of space, our understanding of the universe and our galaxy evolves. The quest to map the galaxy isn’t over yet, but humanity is about to discover how the shape of our galaxy fits into the puzzle of the universe.
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