The Milky Way said it.

Whether we study astronomy or not, we have probably seen pictures of the Milky Way.

The pictures of the Milky Way we have seen in the past are vividly similar to the shape of poached eggs. They are disc-shaped from top to bottom, with flat sides and a small protrusion in the middle.

In recent years, scientists have gained a new understanding of the shape of the Milky Way, and found that the Milky Way is likely to be quite different from the previous cognition.

First of all, on the scale, the diameter of the Milky Way has exceeded 654.38+ million light-years that scientists once thought, and it may reach 654.38+05 million or even 200,000 light-years. At present, the temporarily released data is at least 65.438+02 billion light years.

In addition, on the upper and lower sides of the "yolk" of the Milky Way, it is not an empty interstellar space, but two huge mysterious structures-Fermi bubbles. These two Fermi bubbles are like two balloons, but they are extremely huge and extend tens of thousands of light years.

However, the latest research shows that even this shape of the Milky Way is not the real shape of the Milky Way. Even if Fermi bubbles are not mentioned, the shape of the Milky Way is not flat, but S-shaped!

In the last six years, the Las campana Observatory in Chile has carried out a project called Sky Research-Optical Gravity Lens Experiment (OGLE), which took 206,726 sky images, including 1, 055030,021star.

Researchers from institutions such as Warsaw University in Poland used these space photos for research, trying to draw a 3D scale map of the Milky Way, and unexpectedly came to this conclusion.

Their main observation object is called Cepheid Variable Star. Cepheid variable stars are very famous celestial bodies in astronomy, belonging to variable stars. The so-called variable star means that the luminosity will change periodically. Cepheid variables are more characteristic, and their luminosity changes are directly linked to their distance from us. In other words, we can easily know how far they are from us by simply observing their changing rules, so they are often used to measure the distance between nearby celestial bodies or their galaxies, and are called cosmic rulers.

In this study, astronomers chose 24,365,438+0 Cepheid variables to draw a 3D model of the Milky Way. They originally wanted to know the evolution and development of the Milky Way in recent hundreds of millions of years, but they made an unexpected discovery.

From the images they drew, it can be seen that the Milky Way is obviously not a horizontal organization, but a shape with one side upturned and the other side bent downward, which is similar to an S-shape. This bending not only exists at the edge of the Milky Way, but also starts from the center of the Milky Way, and only becomes obvious with the increase of the distance from the center of the Milky Way. At a distance of 60,000 light years from Yinxin, the distance between galactic plane and galactic plane is 4,500 light years, which is very obvious. From the picture, it looks like a bar chair seat, which is very interesting.

In fact, this result is basically consistent with the research results published by an international scientific team led by China Academy of Sciences in the British journal Nature Astronomy in February this year. At that time, humans first discovered that the Milky Way actually had such a structure.

Why the Milky Way is not flat, but this warping structure is still a mystery. Some scientists believe that at the outer edge of the Milky Way, the attraction of the Milky Way to celestial bodies is already relatively small. At the same time, there are other galaxies near the Milky Way, and the gravitational effect of these galaxies leads to the distortion of the outer edge of the Milky Way. However, such a beautiful shape, if only for this reason, is also a bit incredible.

Scientists point out that not only the Milky Way, but also many galaxies outside the river have the same structure. The study of this structure is of great significance for understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies and the laws of the universe.

The research paper was published online in the American journal Science on August 1.