![galactic disk map galactic disk map](https://thefirstnews-cms.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/esshsf0edofv8i39d62nwk.jpeg)
“We found that in 3D our collection of 1339 Cepheid stars and the Milky Way’s gas disk follow each other closely.
![galactic disk map galactic disk map](https://room.eu.com/images/contents/MilkyWayStructureCropped.jpg)
“It is notoriously difficult to determine distances from the sun to parts of the Milky Way’s outer gas disk without having a clear idea of what that disk actually looks like,” says Xiaodian Chen, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and lead author of the article in Nature Astronomy. In the galaxy’s far outer disk, the hydrogen atoms making up most of the Milky Way’s gas disk are no longer confined to a thin plane, but they give the disk an S-like, warped appearance. Warped: Macquarie University astronomer Professor Richard de Grijs is the co-author of a paper published in Nature Astronomy today that found the Milky Way’s disc of stars becomes increasingly twisted the further away the stars are from the galaxy’s centre.įrom a great distance, our galaxy would look like a thin disk of stars that orbit once every few hundred million years around its central region, where hundreds of billions of stars provide the gravitational ‘glue’ to hold it all together.īut the pull of gravity becomes weaker far away from the Milky Way’s inner regions. Instead, it becomes increasingly ‘warped’ and twisted far away from the Milky Way’s centre, according to astronomers from Macquarie University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who have built the first accurate 3D map of Earth’s home galaxy and unveiled it today in a paper published in Nature Astronomy. Our Milky Way galaxy’s disk of stars is anything but stable and flat.