The Shape of the Milky Way Is Warped and Twisted (abc.net.au)

Necroloth writes: You probably thought that if you were looking at our galaxy from the outside and at a distance, you would see a thin disc of stars that orbit around a central region, but the further away from the inner regions of the Milky Way you are, the less the pull of gravity. At the outer disc, the hydrogen atoms that make up the Milky Way's gas disc are, as a consequence, warped into an S-like shape, no longer pulled together in a thin plane. A group of astronomers from Australia and China have built their "intuitive and accurate three-dimensional picture" by mapping 1339 classical Cepheids. There's a quick animation of the galaxy on the @NatureAstronomy twitter here. The study has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Comments

And Earth in the bend

[SuperKendall]

An interesting aspect of this is that our solar system I think is in the part where the disc starts to bend, according to this diagram of where our solar system is in the galaxy...

It seems like it would be kind of irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but maybe for some reason in the places where the gas discs of a universe start to bend, life it more likely for some reason. Or course, with a sample size of one you can't really extrapolate much - just seems like an interesting coincidence.

If I'm wrong about the location I would love to know more exactly where we are.

Re:And Earth in the bend

[Sique]

On a planet with an ocean, you have an environment free from ionizing radiation: under water. On Earth, Life doesn't seem to have moved on land until enough free oxygen was in the atmosphere to create an ozone layer about 400 mio years ago. There has been another period on Earth with at least 10% of oxygen in the atmosphere about 2.1 billion years ago, causing iron in the Earth's crust to oxide and create large layers of reddish stone. It could have give rise to a first development of multicellular life, albeit the nature of the fossils is still in dispute.

The Shape of the Milky Way Is Warped and Twisted

[grep -v '.*' *]

Just like my soul.

Or at least personality -- instead of the SuperBowl I watched this instead. Much funner.

I *DID* miss the Puppy Bowl though; I'm ashamed of that.