The Bones of the Milky Way
- Author(s)
- Alyssa A. Goodman, J. F. Alves, C. Beaumont, R. A. Benjamin, M. A. Borkin, A. Burkert, T. M. Dame, J. Kauffmann, Thomas Robitaille
- Abstract
The Milky Way is typically thought of as a spiral galaxy, but our
understanding of its detailed structure remains vague thanks to our
observational vantage point within its disk. Most of what we do know
about the Milky Way's three-dimensional geometry comes from
velocity-resolved observations of gas and stars. But, recently, it has
become possible to combine exquisitely sensitive observations of dust
with more traditional kinematically-resolved observations of gas to
reveal totally new structures within the Milky Way. In this talk, I will
explain why we now believe that some extraordinarily long so-called
"infrared dark clouds" are in fact the "bones" of the Galaxy, marking
out the true mid-plane of its disk to within less than a few parsecs. We
call the long features "bones" thanks to recent numerical simulations of
spiral galaxies that show a network of over-dense filaments within and
between the arms that resemble an endoskeleton for a galaxy. The talk
will highlight how both large surveys and new visualization tools have
been critical in this investigation. By way of example, I will argue
that the "Nessie" Infrared Dark Cloud is a nearly-continuous,
many-hundreds-of-pc-long, ~pc-thick, structure, lying within a few pc of
the mid-plane of the MIlky Way.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Astrophysics
- External organisation(s)
- California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Medizinische Universität Wien, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Harvard University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie
- Volume
- 221
- Publication date
- 01-2013
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 103004 Astrophysics, 103003 Astronomy
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/15d322b8-bc13-4394-a5ed-a8af97026ba4