Saturday, September 14, 2013

Scientists say that the Milky Way is shaped like a peanut to ... - The Ball

The central region of the Milky Way looks like a nut and a structure in ‘X’ under certain perspectives. This was the conclusion reached by the astronomers who made “the best map ever to three dimensions,” according to the European Southern Observatory

Scientists used public data from the VISTA telescope, the observatory, and measurements movements of hundreds of stars ‘very faint’, located in the central galactic bulge (one of the most important and most massive of the Milky Way), a cloud core, with about ten thousand million stars, about 27,000 years light away from Earth.

“We found that the inner region of our galaxy is shaped like a peanut in the shell, viewed from one side, and to a very elongated bar, view from above,” said Ortwin Gerhard, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.

“The depth of the star catalog VISTA far exceeds previous work and can detect the total population of these stars in all regions except the more obscure, “observed Christopher Wegg, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

Scientists this German institute identified 22 million stars belonging to the class of red giants.

The OES revealed that astronomers think the Milky Way ‘was originally a pure disk of stars, which formed a bar [long, thin structure] flat for billions of years “, which later gave rise to” the peanut-shaped, three-dimensional , seen in the new observations. “

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