What is the Radcliffe Wave, a cosmic structure that redefines our galaxy

Astronomers are constantly discovering strange things in space, and the latest thing they’ve named radcliffe wave, This series of wave-shaped star-forming clouds is the largest coherent structure ever seen in our galaxy: 9,000 light years from end to end, spanning the night sky canis major Until cygnuswith orion between.

Now it turns out that the Radcliffe wave is indeed blowing. This has been said in an article published in the magazine on Tuesday Nature, Star-formed clouds rise above the plane of the galaxy and then descend. This type of oscillation is known as a traveling wave, which is similar to sports fans “waving” by getting up from their seats in a synchronous pattern around the stadium.

“It’s a good thing… you could find articles hinting at this in the past, but it’s been debunked now. It’s a brick in the wall and it’s not going to come out,” said Bob Benjamin, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater who was not part of the new research. “This new work is a really important step in understanding the origin of this structure”,

This structure is located inside our galaxy and practically right next to it. It’s spitting, if you could spit 500 light years.

There’s another twist to the tale: It looks like what our solar system went through radcliffe wave about 13 million years ago and could have An interesting time for life land, These star-forming regions contain more than their share of exploded stars. “We may have had a supernova celebration 13 million years earlier than we thought.”explain katherine zuckerStudy co-author and astrophysicist Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,

Until a few years ago, no one recognized that the numerous star-forming clouds located relatively close to the Sun were part of a coherent structure. This is because astronomers can see distant galaxies better than the galaxies around us Galaxy, There is no telescope in intergalactic space that can capture beautiful images of our entire galaxy, a few million light years away. (If it is, then it is not ours.)

“If you hold it too close to your face it’s really hard to see what the structure of your hand is,” explains Alyssa Goodman, a professor of astronomy at Harvard and co-author of the new report. “We can’t fly out of the galaxy.” Astronomers have known for a century that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies. They also know that our galaxy is a large spiral galaxy, similar to the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy.

A cloudy ribbon of milky light that can be seen on a clear night – and as they discovered Galileo Here’s a marginal view of the plane of our galaxy, filled with individual stars – from a telescope four centuries ago. The galaxy is a pancake-shaped disk, made of relatively thick dough. We are in the middle, and we can see stars in all directions that are part of the pancake.

But only in recent years has it become possible to create accurate three-dimensional maps of the stars and gas in our region of the galaxy. This is partly due to the spacecraft GAIA of European Space AgencyDesigned to measure the distances to millions of stars in our galaxy and their relative motions with each other with unprecedented precision.

“Fixed stars,” as astronomers and sailors call them, aren’t actually sitting in deep space. Everything works. Our Solar System orbits the center of the Milky Way over the course of approximately 226 million Earth years.

using data from GAIA, joao alves, Zakhar, good man and six colleagues described it radcliffe wave In an article published in 2020 Nature, He named it in honor of the early 20th century astronomers associated with it Radcliffe Collegegraduates among them henrietta levittwho discovered that the periodic brightness of certain stars encodes information about their distance to them land,

That discovery was instrumental in discovering that the intriguing “spiral nebulae” seen through telescopes are actually structures outside the universe. GalaxyThe various galaxies in the universe are vast beyond imagination.

The Radcliffe Wave appears to be the backbone of our galaxy’s spiral arm closest to the Sun (or “gas reservoir,” as called in a 2022 article), known as the Orion Arm or Local Arm. Additional updates to Gaia allowed scientists to create theoretical models to track the motion of star clusters within the wave, revealing their waves.

Now the big question is: Why do Radcliffe waves ripple?

“Who ordered this?” Goodman asked.

It’s clear that something has happened to disrupt our galactic neighborhood and impose chaos on the skies. One possibility is that something – perhaps a dwarf galaxy – crashed into the Milky Way and created a huge wave, and the wave is a domino effect.

Another possibility is that a sequence of supernovae – explosions of stars that emit powerful bursts of radiation – shook things up. Or it could be a combination of factors. “It may be that the stars exploded as supernovae and pushed gas and dust out from the galaxy’s base.”explain Ralph KonietzkaPhD student Harvard and lead author of the new article. According to Konietzka, this wave pattern will disappear in a few tens of millions of years.

Zucker and colleagues say there is still much more to investigate More scientific articles are about to be published. The geological record may contain indications that land was affected by supernova explosions in that ancient transit through radcliffe wave,

land It has a magnetic field that helps protect it from potentially harmful radiation from the Sun, and the solar wind coming from the Sun forms a large protective bubble around the entire Solar System that protects us from dangerous radiation coming into space from other parts of the galaxy. Helps protect against particles. ,

But this is where “interstellar climate” complicates the picture. A nearby supernova could have compressed that bubble, called the heliosphere, to such an extent that our planet was completely exposed to the interstellar medium.

The next step is to search the geological record for evidence. land It was found to contain iron isotopes consistent with exposure to a supernova about 13 million years ago and then cross-referencing with anything of interest in the biological record. “Galaxies may be more dynamic than we thought”he says Konietzka,

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