Best Milky Way Map Yet Confirms Our Galaxy Is Warped and Twisted (cnet.com) 82
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.
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.
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Obama would have made the shootings stop.
Obama didn't do squat (except call the police stupid).
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That is why you take more than one picture.
Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd say that it is shaped like a Pringle," said study co-author Radek Poleski, an astronomer at Ohio State University in Columbus.
I sense Pringles' new advertising campaign...
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Buy our snack, it's warped and twisted?
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The wavy Pringles are pretty decent.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
I sense Pringles' new advertising campaign...
This would be an excellent chance for a special edition Milky Way chocolate bar product:
"Shaped like the real Milky Way galaxy that we live in!"
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A galaxy of flavor in the palm of your hand (becomes a pile of goo stuck to your shoe).
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Warped and twisted you say? (Score:1)
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Or as Lydia Deetz [fandom.com] might say, "I myself am warped and twisted".
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Pizza is Italian, pasta is Italian... noodley appendages... FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER.
Twisted ? (Score:2)
cepehid brightness vs. distance (Score:1)
which are particularly useful for plotting a map because their brightness fluctuates over time.
They are useful, because their absolute brightness depends on the frequency of the fluctuations, and therefore can be used to determine the distance by simply measuring their brighness.
Re:Sounds like bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Except that this isn't a picture - it's a mapping of star distribution. We know our position relative to the center of the galaxy. We can map the position of these stars relative to ourselves. Ergo, we can plot the position of them relative to the center. After doing that we can see that there is a general trend on the edges to twist "up" or "down" (relative to the plane) on each side.
Put it this way: if you're standing inside a room that's an oval you can still tell its shape even if you're inside it.
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Put it this way: if you're standing inside a room that's an oval you can still tell its shape even if you're inside it.
But can you do the same if most of the room space is taken up by furniture blocking the view?
If each piece of furniture blocks less than a nanometer^2 of your view, it's not much of a problem.
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Hey, its the smartest human that has ever lived, nobody can possibly think of something he can't think of, so anything he doesn't understand is automatically false.
I bet you don't believe in gravity or relativity either, right?
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It's sad that flat-earth logic has made its way to /. Replace "milky way" with "earth" and you have the pre-sixties argument for why we cannot know the shape of the earth.
Re:Sounds like bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't need to go outside our galaxy to have a pretty good idea of what it looks like. Thanks to the Gaia mapping mission, we have accurate distance and angle measurements for ~1 billion stars in our galaxy. And we have lots of other data (like the measurements from TFA) in addition.
Some areas are obscured, but those are relatively small (mostly the area behind the galactic center).
So is our map of the galaxy 100% complete? No. But it's more than good enough to discuss things like the overall shape of our galaxy.
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Thanks to the Gaia mapping mission, we have accurate distance and angle measurements for ~1 billion stars in our galaxy.
Which sounds like a lot, but the Gaia mission's data is accurate to +/- 10% at distances of 8000 parsecs. For comparison, the Milky Way is roughly 34,000 parsecs across. The Gaia program itself points out that they have data for about 1% of Milky Way stars.[1]
Gaia was supposed to measure with an accuracy of 20 microarcseconds, giving it a reach of 50,000 parsecs. In practice, it wasn't that reliable. When talking about interstellar distances saying "we have accurate distance and angle measurements" need
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Make Epicycles Great Again!
None of that fake Global Decentering. Total and complete scientific fraud. Galileo should go back to that filthy brown dwarf he came from.
Flat Galaxy Society (Score:2)
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The cloud of stars we see along the visible streak are mostly local. It's not a good vantage point. And it's not uniform anyhow.
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We can see Andromeda as a smear of light, why would the smeared band of Milky Way be from local stars only? there aren't enough stars within 1000 light years (about half of 84K that would be above horizon) to make continuous band
XLock and XScreensaver (Score:1)
Explains Fermi's Paradox: we look dodgy (Score:2)
We live in a shithole galaxy, how embarrassing.
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To be fair, if we only had the Galaxyfax report, we'd have known our galaxy had been in a collision 10 billion years ago. And the service history of the previous owner is crap, too.
My God ... (Score:1)
Sixty Symbols (Score:1)
I have found recently and by now spent countless hours on the repository of videos from the university of Nottingham (I think) - the channel for astronomy is called DeepSkyVideos [youtube.com]. They talk about different objects in the sky with a bit more precise language and with deep knowledge about the subject than the author of TFA here did (but maybe I am to harsh). There is a related (I think) channel Sixty Simbols [youtube.com]. Great stuff presented there. Great explanations and stuff I always wanted to know but did not get the
a favorite HHG quote ... (Score:1)
“The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it's always reality that's got it wrong."
Just feeling a little nostalgic, and still sad that DNA died so young.