A few years ago, astronomers uncovered one of the Milky Way's greatest secrets: an enormous, wave-shaped chain of gaseous clouds in our sun's backyard, giving birth to clusters of stars along the spiral arm of the galaxy we call home.
A few years ago, astronomers uncovered one of the Milky Way's greatest secrets: an enormous, wave-shaped chain of gaseous clouds in our sun's backyard, giving birth to clusters of stars along the spiral arm of the galaxy we call home. Naming this astonishing new structure the Radcliffe Wave, the team now reports that the Radcliffe Wave not only looks like a wave, but also moves like one -- oscillating through space-time much like 'the wave' moving through a stadium full of fans.
A traveling wave is the same phenomenon we see in a sports stadium when people stand up and sit down in sequence to “do the wave.” Likewise, the star clusters along the Radcliffe Wave move up and down, creating a pattern that travels through our galactic backyard. “Now we can go and test all these different theories for why the wave formed in the first place," Zucker said.
"It turns out that no significant dark matter is needed to explain the motion we observe," Konietzka said. “The gravity of ordinary matter alone is enough to drive the waving of the wave." The National Science Foundation, NASA, ESA, and the European Research Council Advanced Grant ISM-FLOW supported this work. A new snapshot of an ancient, far-off galaxy could help scientists understand how it formed and the origins of our own Milky Way. At more than 12 billion years old, BRI 1335-0417 is the oldest ...
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