Astronomers have presented a twist on how we see our galaxy, the Milky Way, with a new three-dimensional map.
Our galaxy was generally thought to be a flat disc consisting of some 250 billion stars. The new map suggests the disc isn鈥檛 flat but instead is twisted into a S-shape.
Looking at the distance of some of the brightest, pulsating stars in the Milky Way, known as Cepheids, scientists at the University of Warsaw, Poland, were able to build a large-scale model of the galaxy.
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鈥淐epheids are ideal to study the Milky Way structure,鈥� says Dorota Skowron, who led the work. Her team searched for these stars, which change their brightness in a specific pattern, using a telescope in Chile. By observing them, they imaged the entire visible Milky Way more than a hundred times.
The team says the warping shown in the resulting map聽may have been caused by past interactions with smaller galaxies within the Milky Way called satellite galaxies or as a result of intergalactic gas and dark matter.
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