What’s on the Milky Way’s Far Side?

What is compared to the milky road?

By Phil likes Edited Lee bills

You thought, seeing that we live inside the Milky path, now we would now be pretty good at the map, along with comprehension of the structure and general component.

Being embedded in milk mode is an important obstacle to our galactic cartography, however. We see all the other galaxies from the outside, most observe in front of us. This makes its structure quite easy.

But for our own milk path, we are stuck inside with a wonderful view. Imagine that you are in a giant fog-filled warehouse, you can always see the floor and ceiling, but darkness blocks a deep view of the building perimeter. You can see boxes and other goods accumulated on the surrounding shelves, but your spatial awareness passes through a dozen meters. You can say what is there; You don’t know what’s far from the walls or storage periphery or near its center.

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Astronomers have this very problem. If our galaxy is made up of stars, we would see clearly. But it is full of dust: small, small or sootic materials created when massive stars die, has been turned on in a wide wind that is expelled in space. Millions of those stars over the trillion have drowned the milk path with dust, Filling with opaque cloudsLock our sight and limit our vision. All the stars we can see basically are “near” in the side of the milk path.

However, we can trust with great confidence that our galaxy disk has a flat-spherical central spherent; In a dark moonless night, we see the sky that comes out in a circle next to the Constellation of Sagittarius. We are inside that vague disk, therefore, the mysterious flow created by the combined light of the stars (called milk mode, our galaxy is also named).

But what can we see outside the stars? What is the general structure of our galaxy, and what is in the middle and the other?

I have good news: I told you before I lie. Well, I didn’t have so much information. Despite the unbailabed disk blocks visible (“Optical” is clear, other long lights, such as radio waves and infrared, dusty through sufficient powder. So we can see what is farther away from our eyes.

For example, the center of our galaxy is so dusty, so unnecessary optical telescopes is almost useless, but with infrared telescopes, we can see the light emitted by the objects there. Using such tools, astronomers have been able to follow the stars Accurately, their movement stars reveal and clearly not light or infrared at our Galaxy Center. A supermassive black hole called Sagittarius * with a mass of mass of more than four million sun.

Radio waves have longer wavelength than infrared and can pass through dust. In 2010 Astronomers detected a huge cloud of gas 31,000 lights from the ground, on the other side of our galaxy. Tracking observations in Infrared revealed that the stars are actively formed that the gas and dust is a huge cloud; Astronomers named Dragonfish Nebula likeness to tropical fish. There are two degrees during the sky, as wide as the apparent size of the full moon. This, in view of the astronomical distance of nebula, makes it horrible 1,000 light years wide; Compare with Orion Nebula, a pretty nearby starcutter, a couple of dozen only light.

Dragonfish is the largest nebula like milk, easily visible from other galaxies, but it is completely invisible for our optical telescopes.

However, we can do even better. Some of these gas clouds are powerful microwave lights, with a wavelength between infrared and radio waves. The physics behind these spills is essentially equal to the laser, so we call them maser (m microwave), and can be seen throughout the galaxy. By combining the observations of telescopes around the world, we can achieve ultraprecise measurements of movements and distances.

These clouds are the naughty of the galaxy, starded in starded streams: his spiral arms. In fact, observations of these masses have shown that our milk path is a great example of a spiral galaxy. The astronomers have seen that our galaxies have four large-scale arms. But There is also a fifth arm, no less than a quarter path around the galaxyThe foam; This “local arm” has our solar system. Other measurements of radio astronomy have specified our galactic coordinates with great detail: The sun is about 26,000 light years from the center-Not halfway through 120,000 clear disks, and is very close to the middle end of the Milky path.

G1.9 + 0.3 is another galactic object It has found a series of radio telescopes located in the desert Mexico. Supernova is the sand, expanding gaseous wastes of a star that exploded. The light of this explosion recently arrived at the ground, becoming the most popular Supernova in our Galaxy, but the hands-made dust darkened so much clearly visible at all. Its location is believed to be more than 27,000 lights from the ground, he barely puts it on the side of the galaxy.

X-rays can also internalize our galaxy dust. In 2004 the horrible wave of great energy was entered through the groundA magnetar exploded: very vigorous and magnetically loaded Neutron star He called SGR 1806-20. The explosion was so strong that satellites designed to measure X-ray sky and physically affected by the Earth’s atmosphere. And he made 40,000 and 50,000 lights, Clean the other side of the milky road. Magnets are quite rare, they are known for our little galaxies, except SGR 1806-20, compared to the Galactic Center. It is possible that the other side (we hope) on the other side that is stronger than that.

Clearly half of our galaxy is worth exploring! The volume of local space is filled with amazing objects, such as Wolf-racet Strong star exploding powder wavesThe stars that are just on the edge of the explosion and Exoplanets galoreTo name a handful. What other treasures are there to find on the other side? The Milky Way reaches the farther, our galactic census, the best, is only half.