Our corner of the Milky Way galaxy may be a bigger deal than scientists thought.
Our corner of the Milky Way galaxy may be a bigger deal than scientists thought.
Our corner of the Milky Way galaxy may be a bigger deal than scientists thought.
The galaxy is shaped like a disk, with four major arms of stars, dust and gas spiraling out from the center. Our solar system lies at the edge of what's called the Local Arm, which resembles a separate piece of an arm.
Historically, the Local Arm -"didn't get much respect.... People thought it was just a tiny little thing,-" says Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But a new paper he co-authored concludes it is bigger than scientists thought.
Researchers calculated that it stretches more than 20,000 light-years long, maybe about four times what scientists had thought before, he said. That's still a lot shorter than the major arms.
The work was done by analyzing radio-wave emissions with the Very Long Baseline Array, a series of Earth-based dishes. Results were released Wednesday by the journal Science Advances.
The study, which also investigates other aspects of the Local Arm, -"provides important contributions to the better understanding of our galaxy,-" said Denilso Camargo of Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He didn't participate in the new work.
