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In the Milky Way, not far from our Sun, there is a colossal chain of gas clouds. it’s called the Radcliffe Wave. Some 800 million stars live within the Radcliffe wave, and the wave’s star-forming gas is even now seeding hundreds of millions more.
As you can imagine, the astronomers who discovered the Wave called it that because it looked like a “wave” to them, and in a new paper, some of the same astronomers now present evidence that it’s a literal wave, too. They realized that it oscillates over time, and its stars rise through the Milky Way’s disk before falling back down.
“Using the motion of young stars born in gaseous clouds along the Radcliffe Wave,” Ralf Konietzkagraduate student at Harvard and lead author of the paper, said in a statement“We can track the movement of its natal gas to show that the Radcliffe wave is actually waving.”
Related: The Very Large Telescope takes a magnificent photograph of the star-studded core of the Milky Way (photo)
The Radcliffe wave is the largest gas structure known to astronomy. It is up to 400 light-years deep and 9,000 light-years long, and ripples almost a tenth the diameter of the Milky Way. At its closest point to us, the wave is only 500 light years away. Astronomers discovered did so several years ago when they mapped the dust of our galaxy.
However, what they had not done at that time was observe how the stars moved within the Wave. They did not know which direction the bodies were heading or at what speed they were heading there. Now they have completed that puzzle using data from the European Space Agency. Gaia spacecraft. And when they did, they found that the Wave clusters rose and fell in a pattern that spread throughout the galaxy like a wave.
Learning more about the Wave can tell us more about how our galaxy operates. For example, astronomers discovered that the entire wave radiates from the center of the galaxy. This suggests the stars that forged the Local bubbleA cavity in the interstellar gas around our solar system that probably arose from supernovae between 10 and 20 million years ago, may have originated in the Radcliffe wave.
The team’s research was published in the journal. Nature on February 20.