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The Milky Way’s first known ‘feather’ founded by Astronomers.
The Milky Way is having a “feather” in its cap.
A long, thin strip of cold, dense gas stretches from the center of the galaxy, connecting the threatened arms of the galaxy, astronomers reported on November 11 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. This is the first time that such a structure, which looks like a Feather in the middle of a quill, has been observed in the Milky Way.
The group that found the Feather of our galaxy called it the Gangotri wave, after the ice-water source of India's longest river, the Ganges. In Hindi and other Indian languages, the Milky Way is called the Akasha Ganga, “the river Ganga in the sky,” says astronomer Veena V.S. at the University of Cologne in Germany.
He and his colleagues discovered the Gangotri wave by observing cold carbon monoxide gas clouds, dense and easy to track, in data from the APEX telescope in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. The building ranges from 6,000 to 13,000 light-years from Norma's Milky Way arm to a small arm near a galactic area called the 3-kiloparsec arm. To date, all other known gas tendrils in the Milky Way have been linked to windswept arms (SN: 12/30/15).
Gangotri wave has another unusual feature: paleness. The string seems to wrap around the ground like a fourteenth wave during thousands of light years. Astronomers are not sure what could cause that, says Veena.
Some galaxies have feathers, but when it comes to the Milky Way, it is “extremely difficult” to map the galaxy from the inside out. He hopes to find some galaxy feathers and other fragments of our galaxy structure. "One by one, we will be able to map the Milky Way."
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