Map of Milky Way Redrawn (again)
Written by Nicholos Wethington
Just yesterday Fraser wrote about the Milky Way's demotion from a 4-arm spiral galaxy to a 2-arm. This isn't the only change we'll have to accept about our home galaxy: a Milky Way mapping project has discovered stars in the galaxy moving slower and in more elliptical orbits than predicted. This means we might have to redraw the map we have of our own neighborhood yet again.
Astronomers using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) - a collaboration of ten radio telescopes across the United States - tracked the positions of masers in a dozen star-forming regions in the Milky Way. They used parallax to determine the distance to the masers, then combined this information with how the masers shifted in the plane of the sky, giving a 3-dimensional model of their movement.
Drawing a map of the Milky Way is a challenging task, as we only have an edge-on view of the galaxy in which we reside. To top it off, it's full of dust and gas that muck up the view in the visible light spectrum. Using the VLBA's radio antennae, though, has made it possible to track radio-emitting bodies as they move across the sky because radio waves travel more easily through matter than does light. Since the VLBA functions as one huge telescope, it can track the position of stars with great accuracy.
"Right now, our map of the Milky Way still has large areas marked 'Here there be dragons.' Ten years from now, those areas will be filled in," said Mark Reid, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Reid presented these findings at a press conference at the 212th American Astronomical Society meeting.
Instead of neatly circling the galactic center, the stars mapped by Reid and his colleagues are tracing an elliptical orbit. Previous maps of the Milky Way have assumed that the material in our galaxy orbits the center in a circular fashion, so stars that don't follow this path come as somewhat of a surprise.
The stars are moving slower likely because of the loss of angular momentum when they interact gravitationally with other matter in the galaxy, traveling through what is called a 'density wave'. The best description of a density wave I've run across has to be Phil Plait's over at Bad Astronomy:
If you were in a helicopter over a traffic jam on the freeway, it would look like the jam is a permanent fixture of the traffic. But in reality, cars leave the jam at the same rate as cars entering it. So while the jam itself stays put, the cars making it up always change. So it is with spiral arms: they are places where the matter in the galaxy is compressed, but stars enter the jam and stars leave. The arm looks permanent, but over time its resident stars, gas, and dust change
This probably won't be the last time the map of the Milky Way gets edited. The European Space Agency's Gaia satellite is set to launch in 2011, and will provide a 3-dimensional map of 1 billion stars located as far as 30,000 light-years away from Earth.
Source: CfA Press Release
Filed under: Astronomy
June 4th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Actually, the traffic jam travels backwards. I saw it on a video of some japanese (I think) guys that were researching some traffic thing, can't find it on youtube now, but I'm almost positive it was there.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Aha! Find it!
Here. You can clearly see that the jam goes backwards. (Always nice to prove the BA wrong
)
June 5th, 2008 at 4:52 am
I did some work on shockwaves in traffic flow many years ago and yeah the waves go in the opposite direction to the traffic flow
June 5th, 2008 at 4:54 am
And actually VLBA stands for Very Long Baseline Array…
June 5th, 2008 at 6:09 am
Why is having two arms a demotion from four? What if those two arms are really BIG?
June 5th, 2008 at 6:13 am
Do the maps represent what we see today or where the stars really are today? It takes a long time for the radio waves to reach us across so much distance, so have the stars moved noticeably compared to what we see as the apparent origin of the radio waves? I suppose that across such distances, the difference may not be significant.
June 5th, 2008 at 6:44 am
Every time they redraw the map of the Milkyway the cool stuff gets further away
June 5th, 2008 at 10:37 am
I recently read a study done by astronomers at Georgia State University, that focused on the timing of Ice Age epochs correlated to passages of the sun through the galaxies spiral arms. As part of the study, they mapped the path of the sun as it orbited the galaxy. They found that path to be neither a circle nor an ellipse. Instead it was a three lobed closed path. Could it be that there are three spiral arms, rather than 2 or 4?
June 5th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
"Here there be dragons" hahahah I love it
June 5th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Hell yeah - bring on ESA's Gaia. That'll mix it up a bit and keep things interesting!
June 6th, 2008 at 4:17 am
well, carbon copies
1.
since the center of our galaxy is not circular it may influence other parts in different ways than a circular center would.
2.
I let you into a secret, BUT ONLY THIS TIME: the special motion of a galaxy is due to something called a MASSIVE BLACK HOLE. All spiral galaxy's (of any shape) have those "matter converters" at the center.
We hope you don't cease to exist before you have actually met real intelligent life…
June 8th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Thanks for pointing that out, Arcturus. I fixed it to reflect the actual name of the array.
~Nicholos Wethington