Milky Way 'arm' found (50-year-old map of the Milky Way will have to be redrawn)

Sydney Morning Herald ^ | May 7, 2004

[dead]

A 50-year-old map of the Milky Way will have to be redrawn after Australian astronomers made the astonishing discovery that our spiral galaxy has a huge, outflung arm, New Scientist reports.

The vast gassy limb comprises an arc of hydrogen 77,000 light years long and several thousand light years thick, running along the Milky Way's outermost edge and sweeping around the four main arms that swirl out from the galaxy's core.

As it is not in the visible part of the light spectrum, it cannot be seen by telescope.

Astronomers at the Australia National Telescope Facility in the Sydney suburb of Epping made the discovery in a project to map the distribution of hydrogen gas across the galaxy.

Most of the Milky Way is obscured by interstellar dust, but hydrogen emits radio waves which pass through the dust clouds and which thus make it detectable by radio telescope.

"We see it [the arm] over a huge area of sky," lead astronomer Naomi McClure-Griffiths said.

She speculates the arm is a long gaseous tendril that was once joined up with another spiral limb but became detached.

The study will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers are amazed that the feature had been overlooked, New Scientist says.

"I was absolutely flabbergasted. It was quite clearly seen in some of the previous surveys but it was never pointed out or given a name," said Tom Dame at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.

AFP

[skinkinthegrass]

Well if it was a new Galaxy it could be called Snickers, but, as it stands, its just an off shoot. hmm, maybe Milky Way Lite?

....Original Mounds! :)

BTW, lov the screen name/tag..

[RightWingAtheist]

Edwin Hubble was a conservative Republican. And one of FR's finest is a...well..:


http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/938624/posts

[ColoradoSlim]

My astronomer friend and I (Galaxy Optics) joke about Hubble all the time. In fact just yesterday I was pulling his leg, saying that an image taken with one of his 20" f/4 optics could easily be mistaken for the Hubble Deep Field. Exceedingly red shifted galaxies and quasars...gravitational lensing...f/4 main objective, get it? He called me a GOOBER, and we laughed ourselves sick :) :)

I read a little of the long tedious thread you posted to me, and didn't find anything as hysterical as the Hubble joke above, very cool yes, uproarious, no. I didn't read all 500+ posts did I miss something?

[R. Scott]

Well, five million years is a bit long.
Of course, I won’t be saying that in 4,999,942 years.

[longshadow]

He has a sense of humor.

So do I, but when the premise of your humor contradicts the facts of the article to which you chose to attach it, it loses it's humorous value.

But don't let that stop you; practice makes perfect.

[longshadow]

The article seems to say that this arm is just a cloud of hydrogen. Are there no stars there?

The article conspicuously fails to mention one way or the other, but my hunch is that it's just a cloud of gas. If there were many stars there, they probably would show up elsewhere in the EM spectrum (other than at Hydrogen or visible wavelengths), and hence it would have been detected much sooner.

On the other hand, this newly discovered cloud of gas might have been the repository for the Rose Law Firm billing records before they mysteriously appeared in the WH living quarters during the Clinton Administration mere days after the statute of limitations had run out.

[LibWhacker]

(Just so everyone knows
which arm we're in!)

[Poohbah]

Instead of "Sun" it should say "You are HERE."

[LibWhacker]

Lol . . . I don't go to bars anymore, but there are a couple of winning bar bets in that picture . . . Name the five arms of the Milky Way (not counting this newest find) & . . . Which one are we in?

[ColoradoSlim]

Quite right professor. Forgive me. How dare I make such light hearted comments on what may be the greatest discovery since Copernicus' De Revolutionibus set forth the heliocentric system in 1543. I shall secure my mouth, rest my caviler pen and go forthwith to sit among the dim-witted and dull at the back of the lecture hall.

[PatrickHenry]

Ah ... I've found it. I just knew this galactic arm was old news. Everything has been foretold. Dark matter too. Those smarty-pants scientists "discovered" what has always been known.

Isaiah 45:3 And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Is this the arm that the Large and Small Magellanic galaxies travel in?

[longshadow]

Quite right professor. Forgive me. How dare I make such light hearted comments on what may be the greatest discovery since Copernicus' De Revolutionibus set forth the heliocentric system in 1543. I shall secure my mouth, rest my caviler pen and go forthwith to sit among the dim-witted and dull at the back of the lecture hall.

Or you could dispense with the histrionics and just use a < humor > tag next time you want the rest of us to know when you're making a joke.

Or not... makes no difference to me one way or the other.

[ColoradoSlim]

Come on longshadow, I didn't mean to tease, I'm sorry, I will not joke around on this thread any more, and I changed my tag line for you too. I like dark matter as much as anybody, maybe more. I've been thinking about it a lot this afternoon. Tell me what you think about this (I'd sincerely like to hear your opinion); the estimated mass of the observable universe (amount of mass per volume of space)has been suggested to be somewhere around 3x 10-30 g/cm3, give or take, which includes 10% luminous matter and the balance being made up by dark matter. What this discovery suggests to me is that current calculations are flawed, the universe may contain more dark matter than commonly held. Astronomers have just discovered untold trillions of metric tons of matter that were literally right under our nose. With the universe at critical density, expansion will eventually begin to slow, then stop. Ergo, contraction or the big crunch will begin. It's really pretty cool, of course more observations are needed.

[null and void]

Tag line?

[ColoradoSlim]

Quote from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy... what do you think...ok I'll loose it.

[LibKill]

Perhaps you two could explain the reason that I hear eldricth laughter when I approach the fridge?

[null and void]

*sigh*

My tag line was a quote from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, in response to yours.

Pay attention!

[Twinkie]

Tonight while fixing supper I found a rotten cucumber in
the bottom of my refrigerator. It was barely recognizable
and awful. I haven't cleaned the fridge out in a couple of
months. Sigh. I have to go at it a shelf at a time as that
is all I can stand.

[RightWhale]

New arm of Milky Way galaxy discovered CANBERRA, Australia (Reuters) -- Australian astronomers have discovered an extra cosmic arm in the Milky Way that they believe wraps around the outskirts of the vast galaxy like a thick gas border.

. . .

December 16, 2003

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