New research shows a section of the outer Milky Way is more clumpy, less well-organized than previously thought
When you go outside at night in a rural location with dark skies, you can look up and see a band of stars crossing the sky. That band is our Milky Way galaxy, which we see edge-on since we're inside of it. If we could travel faster than light and climb above the plane of our galaxy, we would see a flat disk with spiral arms wrapping around the core. But what shape, exactly, would those spiral arms have? Stuck here with no bird's-eye view, we have to apply other methods to measure the galaxy's shape.
Moving outward from Earth's location, astronomers have constructed a model of the neighboring spiral arm, known as the Perseus arm. Previous work suggested that the Perseus arm possesses a narrow and distinct shape. However new research shows that at least a portion of the Perseus arm may be illusory, without any well-defined structure. The illusion is a result of complexities first predicted by W. Burton in 1971.
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