Astronomers may have spotted a new spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy

August 16, 2021 admin Comment(0)

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Illustration of our galaxy, the Milky Way seen obliquely, with the arms and the central bar in their approximate known locations. There are four major arms and one arm fragment (Orion-Cygnus or Local) where the Sun is found. In the annotated version of this image, the yellow dot indicates the position of the Solar System about 25000 ly from the galactic core. The Norma and Outer arms are in fact the same, but the two names refer to different parts of it. The same is true of the so-called 3kpc (3 kilo-parsec) arm, which further out becomes the Perseus arm. — An illustration of the spiral arms of the Milky Way

MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images

Astronomers may have found part of a never-before-seen arm of the Milky Way galaxy. This huge stream of gas – named Cattail because of its long, thin shape – is the largest and most distant gas filament ever spotted in our galaxy.

Keping Qiu at Nanjing University in China and his colleagues found one end of Cattail using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China. They then searched data from the HI4PI survey, an all-sky search for hydrogen gas, …

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