Astronomers Find a “Spine” Along Spiral Arms of the Milky Way

(Before It's News)

Researchers have identified the first ‘bone’ of the Milky Way – a long tendril of dust and gas that appears dark in this infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Running horizontally along this image, the bone is more than 300 light-years long but only 1 or 2 light-years wide. It contains about 100,000 suns’ worth of material. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSC

Astronomers have found what may be considered a piece of a galactic skeleton; a dark structure of gas and dust that might provide a backbone on which one of the spiral arms extend from the central bar of the Milky Way galaxy.

“This ‘bone’ is likely made from high density gas — the type that forms stars — and while the feature that we see is a sinuous distinction you get from dust, there is a huge amount of gas,” said Alyssa Goodman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) at a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California today. “But we just don’t know yet what it is.”
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Post tags: galaxies, milky way galaxy

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