If you picture the milklike Way as a whole , you probably think of it as a two-dimensional structure with a small bulging region in the in-between and beautiful spiral arm stretching out . The reality is a fair bit more complicated . There is a taproom , not a bulge , and the Milky Way ’s out disk is not flat but warped .
It is not well-to-do to work this out , pay that we are inside the Milky Way . Many chemical group of stargazer have been puzzle out on 3D maps of the Milky Way and researchers from the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw have constructed an advanced map using a finicky type of adept , known as a Cepheid variable star . The work is published in the journalScience .
Cepheid variables are pulsating stars whose day - to - month - farseeing changes have an extremely unchanging point and are closely linked to their true luminosity . By combining measurements of their observed luminance you’re able to get a moderately good approximation of their length . This relation between pulsation , brightness , and length , devised by American astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt , turned these objects into the first received candle , a sort of cosmic milestone .
Armed with this noesis , the team estimated the distance of 2,431 Cepheid variables in the Milky Way and , using their position in the sky , were able-bodied to create an authoritative 3D map of our galaxy . This gave them a practiced idea of what our galaxy actually looks like .
Earlier this year , anotherstudyemployed Cepheid variables to look at the warping of the Milky Way , but it did not incorporate as many objects as the novel work . The origin of the outer disk ’s lopsidedness is presently unclear . Gravitational interactions with the modest galaxies surrounding the Milky Way or a past merger might have played a role but many believe that internal effect from the massive inner disk could have caused the warp we see .
More elaborated maps of the Milky Way are make out thanks to theEuropean Space Agency ’s Gaia delegation . These could provide even more details on the structure in the Milky Way and provide hint to where they come from .
