I'll second that!
Posted on 08/16/2005 7:04:45 PM PDT by LibWhacker
The Milky Way is not a perfect spiral galaxy but instead sports a long bar through its centre, according to new infrared observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
Galaxies come in a wide variety of shapes usually thought to be produced by gravitational interactions with nearby objects. Some spiral galaxies look like pinwheels, with their arms curving out from a central bulge, while others have a straight bar at their centres.
Radio telescopes detected gas that hinted at a bar at the heart of the Milky Way in the late 1980s. A decade later, observations with the near infrared survey 2MASS bolstered the case for a bar, but dust in the centre of the galaxy obscured the observations.
Now, astronomers have used Spitzer to peer through that dust at slightly longer wavelengths, observing 30 million stars in the galactic plane in the region around the centre of the galaxy.
They found that the central bar was much longer than previous observations had suggested - reaching about half the distance between the galaxy's centre and our Sun. The bar is estimated to stretch a total of about 27,000 light years from end to end.
"It is a major component of our galaxy and has basically remained hidden until now," says team member Ed Churchwell, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, US. "The fact that it's large means it's going to have a major effect on the dynamics of the inner part of our galaxy."
Bar food
Stars in the spiral arms circle the galaxy in roughly circular orbits. But the old, red stars in the bar appear to be on more elliptical paths that take them more directly towards and away from the galaxy's core, where a colossal black hole is thought to lurk.
"This bar probably does carry matter into the centre of the galaxy and feeds the black hole," Churchwell told New Scientist.
But it is still not clear what the discovery reveals about the Milky Way's past. "I don't think anybody really fully understands how bars are formed," says Churchwell. "What we do know is that it appears there are so many barred galaxies they must be rather stable. Astronomers have to come up with some kind of model that can explain the stability of these structures."
The team will publish its results in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters and has requested more time on Spitzer to study the innermost part of the Milky Way.
Take a look back over my post.
(I talk a little about spread spectrum) :-)
Hi, RA! Thanks for the comments. I've been offline and just got back on this morning... Will have some time tonight, I hope, and will return to read everyone's comments and follow up.
I'll second that!
Or where Octopi are turning into tentacled Bug Eyed Monsters. Who knows? I hope somewhere there are desert lizards turning in to The Race. :)
I know you did, I just wanted to make the point that current searches may not be looking for the right sorts of signals, which could explain why they haven't found anything. An even more probable reason is that they haven't yet looked at the right star system. There are lots of them out there, and they have only looked a small fraction of them.
I am with ya 100% :-)
A huge problem. I've got my fingers crossed that nanotechnology will solve it someday.
Very nice tutorial, RA, thanks!
I'll say!
Considering that a Dyson sphere ENCAPSULATES a star and planet(s) within, it would undoubtedly affect the radiation observed from "outside". In effect, the star would (from a distant observer's POV) "fade out" over several generations.
It would merely be a "mystery of the stars" for all observers, unless and until they/we can travel there and find out what's going on.
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