The Far 3kpc Arm
Illustration Credit: R. Hurt (SSC), JPL-Caltech, NASA
Posted on 07/11/2008 3:36:36 PM PDT by sig226
Explanation: A major discovery was lurking in the data. By accident, while preparing a talk on the Galaxy's spiral arms for a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Tom Dame (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA) found it - a new spiral arm in the Milky Way. The arm is labeled in this illustration as the Far 3kpc Arm, located at a distance of 3 kpc (kiloparsecs) or about 10,000 light-years from the galactic center, on the opposite side from the Sun. Along with the Near 3kpc Arm whose presence was known since the mid 1950s, the counterpart inner arms now establish that the galaxy has a simple symmetry. The arms are defined by shocked interstellar gas flowing along both sides of the Milky Way's central bar. Dame and his collaborator Patrick Thaddeus recorded the presence of both inner spiral arms in their radio data tracking emission from carbon monoxide molecules along the galactic plane. How much star formation goes on in the counterpart arms? Despite this depiction of stars and star forming regions along the arms, the last attempt to search for star formation in the Near 3kpc Arm was in 1980 and didn't turn up any. The discovery of the Far 3kpc Arm has renewed interest in this and other questions about the center of the Milky Way.
I just read recently that the M-31/Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way are on a collision course. WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!
Yeh - we’re talking about 3 billion years left before the Big One. I’m not starting any long magazine subscriptions.
Heck, I’m not even buying any green bananas.
Science is sill discovering God's wonders on a daily basis!
I’ve never seen all those labels.
I guess I need a better telescope.
It’s true! Man really IS insignificant in The Big Scheme of Things.
And nothing brings that home faster than a gaze at a clear, star-filled sky. :)
Here’s a better map: http://fantasymaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/map_galaxy_01.jpg
Uhm where is the “You are here” arrow???
But it's a long way to drive home from either one. That's a lot of billboards hiding traffic cops to negotiate safely... hic.
It only took 18pc for Han Solo to get to the Galactic Bar via the Kessel Run...
Actually it was less than twelve parsecs...
You can see them if you can write really small on the objective lens of your scope, but you have to be able to write upside down and backwards or it looks funny.
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