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Milky Way's 'Flyover Country' Mapped
By pointing a powerful NASA space telescope away from our galaxy's star-studded core, astronomers are mapping the Milky Way's more sparsely populated outer fringes.
"We sometimes call this flyover country," Barbara Whitney, an astronomer from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in a statement. But she added that scientists are finding "all sorts of new star formation in the lesser-known areas at the outer edges of the galaxy."
Our solar system sits about two-thirds of the way out from the spiral galaxy's center, in a region known as the Local Arm. Astronomers tend to look inward when piecing together images of the galaxy; the more barren regions in the Milky Way's outer reaches have not been as extensively mapped.
Images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveal cosmic nurseries full of young stars blooming — some in clusters, some alone — in these faraway regions, researchers say. An area near the canine constellation Canis Major, for instance, has 30 or more young stars in early phases of their lives sprouting jets of material, according to a statement from NASA ...
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This is on the same kind of topic as this article here.
By pointing a powerful NASA space telescope away from our galaxy's star-studded core, astronomers are mapping the Milky Way's more sparsely populated outer fringes.
"We sometimes call this flyover country," Barbara Whitney, an astronomer from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in a statement. But she added that scientists are finding "all sorts of new star formation in the lesser-known areas at the outer edges of the galaxy."
Our solar system sits about two-thirds of the way out from the spiral galaxy's center, in a region known as the Local Arm. Astronomers tend to look inward when piecing together images of the galaxy; the more barren regions in the Milky Way's outer reaches have not been as extensively mapped.
Images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveal cosmic nurseries full of young stars blooming — some in clusters, some alone — in these faraway regions, researchers say. An area near the canine constellation Canis Major, for instance, has 30 or more young stars in early phases of their lives sprouting jets of material, according to a statement from NASA ...
For the rest, including pics, click here.
This is on the same kind of topic as this article here.
