Today we're going to be talking about new confirmations and
also new analysis of the unusual structure within our own galaxy within the
milky way the so-called warp of the milky way galaxy with the warp itself being
discovered not so long ago but many different additional confirmations and
different studies have now made it pretty clear that our galaxy is not actually
flat after all in some sense it resembles a typical pringles chip which is very
unusual but also mathematically makes a lot of sense but in this video I wanted
to also talk about what we've recently discovered and what we know about this
warp so far but first of all it's somewhat difficult for us to see the shape of
our own galaxy simply because of where we're located we're inside the galaxy.
So seeing the shape here is practically impossible we can
sort of try to imagine what all this looks like by looking at certain distant
stars but without seeing the motion of these stars it would be impossible for
us to know what the galaxy really looks like but in most scientific textbooks
and also in some sense in most high schools we've always been taught that the
galaxy is more or less flat it sort of resembles this and this is actually what
the galaxy looks like in pretty much any computer simulation that i have as
well and here is one of the many examples of this simplified model of the milky
way galaxy from the side it looks completely flat but in the last few years
we've been making some major discoveries one of the bigger discoveries from last
year was the unusual formation known as the ratcliffe wave this unusual and
really humongous formation is essentially a kind of a wave-like structure that
many stars form around the sun with the sun itself apparently traveling across
the radcliffe wave as well now this is just one of the many signs of unusual
deformations inside our own galaxy more of these signs were discovered by the
polish scientists who identified several major deformations inside the milky
way.
By looking at different distant stars as you can see in this
particular image that they created and interestingly this is not unexpected as
a matter of fact the majority of this galaxies we've seen out there are never
really perfectly flat the best example here is actually this beautiful work
galaxy known as ugc3697 the work within this galaxy has been studied quite
thoroughly and today we understand that it's most likely just like so many
other warps created through some sort of a massive interaction with another
object somewhere nearby usually a relatively massive dwarf galaxy a galaxy
that's not powerful enough to absorb or to disrupt the galaxy but that's still
massive enough to dislodge a lot of these stars within the larger galaxy and to
create a kind of a wave inside of it here's what this galaxy looks like if you
were to look at it with a typical telescope and so something similar most
likely happened in the milky way galaxy and today a lot of scientists at least
in the past year or so mostly came to the conclusion that it was probably caused
by this very strange and somewhat mysterious galaxy known as Sagittarius dwarf
galaxy a galaxy that has a lot of influence on the milky way and potentially
may have also influenced the formation of different stars in the milky way as
well especially when it passes through the disk of the milky way it has a
tendency to dislodge a lot of gas and this gas then sort of clumps together
forming new stars.
There has been a speculation that this galaxy was possibly
even responsible for the formation of our own sun as well essentially through
the deformation of gas as it passes through the milky way galaxy but every time
it passes through the galaxy it also deforms it thus creating this unusual
ripple that you see right here but this is the older simulation based on the
older simulations and older studies analyzing this work today we actually have
a lot more data from different telescopes including some of the most incredible
data coming out of gaia telescope the telescope that's been instrumental in
helping us develop an extremely accurate nearby map of all of the stars and all
the various types of objects moving across the night skies with extremely
specific details of both their motion their temperatures and a lot of other
star properties as well but all this data was also combined with sloan digital
sky survey and specifically the experiment known as apache point observatory
galactic evolution experiments also known as apogee 2.
So by combining the data from Gaia telescope with the data
from sdss the scientists were able to create a really accurate
three-dimensional map of well basically the nearby space and the galaxy itself
this allowed us to see how this work moves across the night skies and most
importantly allowed us to establish the overall size and the motion of this war
here's what all this looks like now this might actually look a little bit fast
but notice how this is in millions of years and interestingly this also allowed
the scientists in this paper to calculate that the work moves across the galaxy
every 440 million years let's actually make it a little bit slower here so
every 440 million years the warp moves around milky way which is roughly around
the double amount of time it takes for the solar system to move across the
galaxy this means that the warp moves a little bit slower than the typical
motion of the star which also implies that the stars go through the warp most
likely going up and down or possibly above and below the galactic plane and
then return back to their normal motion when they leave the warp behind because
these stars do seem to move faster than the war with one of the more unusual
discoveries coming out of this new paper being in regards to the shape of this
warp it seems to be lopsided as the scientists refer to it which implies that
one of the sites here is a little bit more pronounced than the other side.
With one side experiencing something a little bit more
dramatic than the opposite side the scientists were also able to identify where
this warp officially starts and the distance from the center of the galaxy that
they suggest is roughly around 27 to 28 000 light years away now the current
estimates for the distance to the galactic center from the solar system put us
at around 25 to 26 000 light years which also means that we are probably not
really inside the work which also means that that Radcliffe I mentioned might
be something entirely different and may have been created by some other
phenomenon or it's possible that we just don't really understand how all this
stuff forms and we need to study these warps in more detail in order to learn
what's happening here the other unusual discovery here was that the younger
stars seem to be more affected by this than the older stars stars that were 6
to 9 billion years old were not as warped or not as affected by this warp as
the stars that were less than three billion years old and here the scientists
believe that it's something to do with the passage of the nearby dwarf galaxy
most likely Sagittarius dwarf galaxy that did happen three billion years ago.
But the exact reasons for this and the exact explanations
for these differences are currently not really clear either way though it does
seem like milky way galaxy like about 50 to 70 percent of all of the other disc
galaxies is indeed worked just like this one right here maybe not to this
extent though but still worked enough as you can see in this simulation to have
a very pronounced upper edge and lower edge which isn't something that i guess
most of us learned back in high school when we were learning about galaxies
either way a really interesting discovery a very interesting analysis and
definitely something to look forward to once we discover how all of this
happened and what all of this means for the future of our galaxy.
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