Thursday, 13 December, 2018

The Milky Way’s Local Arm is Metropolitan

Posted on Tuesday, 21 January, 2014Sunday, 20 August, 2017 by Zheluo Cai

The Milky Way’s Local Arm is Metropolitan

Earth’s arm of the galaxy is muscular, astronomers announced June 3 at the 222nd American Astronomical Society meeting in Indianapolis. While the Local Arm first appeared to be a mere “spur” of the larger Sagittarius or Perseus arms between which it is sandwiched, new evidence shows it to be a significant limb on its own. Either way, our picture of the Milky Way is changing and may continue to do so as telescopes become increasingly precise and sophisticated.

Scientists’ conception of our galaxy is still evolving because determining the Milky Way’s shape is like mapping a building while stuck in your office. Astronomers cannot step outside and observe the overall structure, so they have to get creative. To upgrade the Local Arm to a metropolitan area, the Bar and Spiral Structure Legacy (BeSSeL) survey team monitored the motions of molecules.

Arp 188 and the Tadpole's Tail.
Image Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA; Processing: Faus Márquez (AAE). Distant galaxies form a dramatic backdrop for this disrupted spiral galaxy Arp 188, the Tadpole Galaxy. It is 420 million light-years distant toward the northern constellation of the Dragon (Draco), with its eye-catching tail of about 280 thousand light-years long, featuring massive, bright blue star clusters. It is theorised that a more compact intruder galaxy crossed in front of Arp 188 - from right to left in this view - and was slung around behind the Tadpole by their gravitational attraction, with tidal forces drawing out the spiral galaxy's stars, gas, and dust forming the spectacular tail. The intruder galaxy, 300,000 light-years behind the Tadpole, is seen through foreground spiral arms at the upper right.

Sunflowers (Tournesols) is the name of two series of still life paintings by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. The first series, executed in Paris in 1887, depicts the flowers lying on the ground, while the second set, executed a year later in Arles, shows a bouquet of sunflowers in a vase. In the artist's mind, both sets were linked by the name of his friend Paul Gauguin, who acquired two of the Paris versions. On March 30, 1987, Japanese insurance magnate, Yasuo Goto, paid the equivalent of US $39,921,750 for van Gogh's Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers at auction at Christie's London. The painting currently resides at Seiji Togo Yasuda Memorial Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

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