A Look at the Milky Way's Future Video. Interactive Sky Map. Fermi Telescope Finds Giant Structure in the Milky Way. Want to stay on top of all the space news?
Follow @universetoday on Twitter From end to end, the newly discovered gamma-ray bubbles extend 50,000 light-years, or roughly half of the Milky Way's diameter, as shown in this illustration. Credit: NASA From a NASA press release: NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. “What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center,” said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first recognized the feature. Finkbeiner and Harvard graduate students Meng Su and Tracy Slatyer discovered the bubbles by processing publicly available data from Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT). Other astronomers studying gamma rays hadn’t detected the bubbles partly because of a fog of gamma rays that appears throughout the sky.
Tagged as: Fermi Telescope, milky way. Giant Structure in our Galaxy. The Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way Galaxy, our home galaxy, is a large barred spiral galaxy containing some 200 to 400 billion stars (possibly many more if brown dwarfs are included).
Its barred structure, and the fact that its spiral arms are quite loosely wrapped, suggests that it is of type Sbc or SBbc in the Hubble galaxy classification scheme. Its main components are a disk, a central bulge, and a halo. Recent estimates put the total mass of the Milky Way Galaxy in the range one to two trillion solar masses, including a large but uncertain amount of dark matter in the dark halo. The Milky Way is the second largest member of the Local Group, after the Andromeda Galaxy. Disk and spiral arms The disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is home to the spiral arms. Because we have no way (at present!) This traditional four-arm scheme has now been challenged by observations made in the infrared part of the spectrum. Cosmic rays go along for the Milky Way ride. Contact: Science Press Packagescipak@aaas.org 202-326-6440American Association for the Advancement of Science Cosmic rays zoom through our galaxy near the speed of light.
These streams of high energy particles may be accelerated in shock waves such as supernova blast waves, but theirs paths are scrambled by interstellar magnetic fields, making it difficult to determine where they came from. A team of Japanese and Chinese researchers led by M. Amenomori analyzed data collected at the high altitude Tibet Air Shower Array, which stands 4,300 meters above sea level. They mapped tens of millions of cosmic ray events collected over 16 years. By examining the maps, they found that cosmic rays rotate around the Milky Way with the gas and stars. The scientists also found a new cosmic ray "hotspot" close to the Cygnus spiral arm, which runs through the constellation Cygnus. These results may lead to improved understanding of cosmic rays, supernovae, magnetic fields and galactic dynamic environments.
Milky Way. Stars and gases at a wide range of distances from the Galactic center orbit at approximately 220 kilometers per second.
The constant rotation speed contradicts the laws of Keplerian dynamics and suggests that much of the mass of the Milky Way does not emit or absorb electromagnetic radiation. This mass has been given the name “dark matter”.[22] The rotational period is about 240 million years at the position of the Sun.[9] The Galaxy as a whole is moving at a velocity of approximately 600 km per second with respect to extragalactic frames of reference. The oldest known star in the Galaxy is at least 13.6 billion years old and thus must have formed shortly after the Big Bang.[6] Surrounded by several smaller satellite galaxies, the Milky Way is part of the Local Group of galaxies, which forms a subcomponent of the Virgo Supercluster.
Appearance[edit] The Milky Way has a relatively low surface brightness. Size and mass[edit] Schematic illustration showing the galaxy in profile. The Scale of Things. Milky Way Structure"