Study Looks At The Milky Way In New Detail

Everyone knows that Earth is located in the Milky Way galaxy. However, it’s very difficult to study the Milky Way because of our position inside of it. NASA has made an interesting discovery that remained unrecognized until now.

NASA has discovered that a cluster of young stars and star-forming gas clouds is sticking out one of the arms of the Milky Way like a splinter. The splinter spans 3000 light-years and is the first major structure identified with an orientation significantly different from the galaxy’s spiral arms.

To learn more about the Milky Way, the new study focused on a nearby portion of one of the spiral galaxy arms known as the Sagittarius Arm. Researchers used data on the arm gathered from the Spitzer Space Telescope before it retired and data from the ESA Gaia mission. The data revealed that the long, thin structure associated with the Sagittarius Arm is made of young stars moving at nearly the same velocity in the same direction through space.

A key property of spiral arms is how tightly they wind around a galaxy, said Michael Kuhn, an astrophysicist at Caltech and lead author of the new paper.
When we put the Gaia and Spitzer data together and finally see this detailed, three-dimensional map, we can see that theres quite a bit of complexity in this region that just hasnt been apparent before, said Kuhn.