Bar at Milky Way's heart revealed

[emad]

Bar at Milky Way's heart revealed


The Milky Way is not a perfect spiral galaxy but instead sports a long bar through its centre, according to new infrared observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Galaxies come in a wide variety of shapes usually thought to be produced by gravitational interactions with nearby objects. Some spiral galaxies look like pinwheels, with their arms curving out from a central bulge, while others have a straight bar at their centres.

Radio telescopes detected gas that hinted at a bar at the heart of the Milky Way in the late 1980s. A decade later, observations with the near infrared survey 2MASS bolstered the case for a bar, but dust in the centre of the galaxy obscured the observations.

Now, astronomers have used Spitzer to peer through that dust at slightly longer wavelengths, observing 30 million stars in the galactic plane in the region around the centre of the galaxy.

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn7854

[htuttle]

1. I've been to that bar

Great music on weekends.

[emad]

2. "Restaurant at the end of the universe"? - Hitchhikers' Guide to

the galaxy got there first.....

[mark11727]

4. Did it look anything like THIS...?

[On the Road]

5. You Must Have That First Line the Same Way I Did

"The Milky Way is not a perfect spiral galaxy but instead a long sports bar..."

[liberal N proud]

3. Mars bar or Milky Way bar?

[Dover]

6. Bar at Milky Way's heart revealed

Bar at Milky Way's heart revealed
18:03 16 August 2005
NewScientist.com news service

The Milky Way is not a perfect spiral galaxy but instead sports a long bar through its centre, according to new infrared observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Galaxies come in a wide variety of shapes usually thought to be produced by gravitational interactions with nearby objects. Some spiral galaxies look like pinwheels, with their arms curving out from a central bulge, while others have a straight bar at their centres.

Radio telescopes detected gas that hinted at a bar at the heart of the Milky Way in the late 1980s. A decade later, observations with the near infrared survey 2MASS bolstered the case for a bar, but dust in the centre of the galaxy obscured the observations.

Now, astronomers have used Spitzer to peer through that dust at slightly longer wavelengths, observing 30 million stars in the galactic plane in the region around the centre of the galaxy.

They found that the central bar was much longer than previous observations had suggested - reaching about half the distance between the galaxy's centre and our Sun. The bar is estimated to stretch a total of about 27,000 light years from end to end.

"It is a major component of our galaxy and has basically remained hidden until now," says team member Ed Churchwell, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, US. "The fact that it's large means it's going to have a major effect on the dynamics of the inner part of our galaxy."....>>
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7854

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Milky Way’s Central Structure Seen with Fresh Clarity
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 16 August, 2005
10:00 am ET


A new infrared survey that claims to be the most comprehensive structural analysis of our galaxy confirms previous evidence for a central bar of stars.

The bar is embedded in the center of the galaxy's spiral arms and cuts across the heart of it all where a supermassive black hole resides. The survey found that the bar is longer than thought and sits at a sharp angle to the galaxy's main plane.....>>


http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050816_milky_way.html

[TechBear_Seattle]

7. "A great pangalactic gargleblaster..."

"... and not as hoity-toity as Millicent's, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe." The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, entry for The Black Hole-in-the-Wall, the Bar at the Center of the Galaxy.

[mike_c]

8. it's the counterpart of the restaurant...

...at the end of the universe. A franchise deal.

[ninty]

9. amazing

[longship]

10. I'll take a Jinnin Tonix.

:toast:
:beer:

[theshadow]

11. That sure is a lot of creamy nougat! eom

[greyl]

12. DUPE

emad posted this already

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x11547

do you read this forum, or just post in it?

[John Q. Citizen]

13. Hey, I just happened across it and it's pretty cool. I'm glad he posted

a DUPE because I would have missed it if he hadn't.

Just my feelings..I know about policy and rules and such, but maybe it's not such a bad thing, at least for me in this instance.

I read a lot of different forums and there is such an overload of all kinds of information. But this was pretty cool.

[greyl]

14. overload is right

That's one of the points of preventing dupes.
This doesn't need to be put into peaceful accord with anyone's cosmic persective...
Sometimes a dupe is just a dupe. :)

[John Q. Citizen]

15. I can dig it, grey! I'm just glad I caught his dupe.