Instead of forming a relatively flat disk, the hundreds of billions of stars that make up the Milky Way form a disk that’s noticeably twisted at the edges, a bit like a flattened letter 'S,' new study shows.
Using observational data from the Optical Gravitational Lens Experiment , an ongoing survey of stars in the southern sky made using a specialized telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the astronomers determined accurate positions for more than 2,400 classical Cepheid stars by comparing the light they were known to produce with the light from them seen here on Earth.
“When we measure the period of a star, we know how much absolute light it emits,” Poleski said. “Then we can compare it with the light that we are getting, and by comparing those two we get the distance.”our galaxy’s weird shape ? Richard de Grijs, an astronomer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, attributed it to the effects of gravitational interactions with neighboring galaxies.
It’s also possible that our galaxy twisted as it merged with smaller galaxies in the distant past, he said, or that its warped shape is the result of the combined gravity of the spiral arms themselves, which could pull stars and clouds at the edges away from the flat plane of the rest of the galaxy.in research published earlier this year, said the new study confirmed and expanded upon the earlier research.
The researchers plan to refine their model of the galaxy with help from telescopes that can see stars in the northern sky.
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