Cosmic Serpent Radcliffe Wave Spotted in Milky Way Is in Motion: It’s ‘Actually Waving’

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI)
Cosmic Serpent Radcliffe Wave Spotted in Milky Way Is in Motion: It's 'Waving'

A cosmic serpent had been spotted in the Milky Way, and researchers had just confirmed it was moving. It reported snaked along our galaxy's spiral arm.

Radcliffe Wave Is in Motion

A few years ago, researchers found a massive, wave-shaped structure that snaked along a spiral arm of the Milky Way, spanning almost 9,000 light-years in length. The structure was only 500 light-years from the Solar System at its closest point.

This squiggle of star-forming gas, known as the Radcliffe Wave, is a spectacular discovery in and of itself, and much remains unknown. However, astrophysicist Ralf Konietzka of Harvard University and his team of scientists have recently discovered one thing -- the Radcliffe Wave is in motion, just like many other Milky Way objects.

Its movement is not merely a rotation around the galaxy's center. The Radcliffe Wave is a periodic traveling wave that oscillates.

"By using the motion of baby stars born in the gaseous clouds along the Radcliffe Wave," Konietzka explained, "we can trace the motion of their natal gas to show that the Radcliffe Wave is actually waving."

A later release of additional Gaia data has provided crucial information that was not available to understand the structure entirely. This allowed the scientists to determine the positions and speeds of star clusters buried in the star-forming material that forms the Radcliffe Wave.

By extrapolating from this data, the scientists discovered that the structure is, in fact, curved, resembling a massive cosmic serpent snaking through the Milky Way.

According to the team's calculations, this motion may be explained by the gravity generated by the galaxy's regular matter; dark matter mapping is unnecessary.

Based on the team's measurements, a cluster of stars within the Radcliffe Wave may have given birth to the supernovae that virtually erased the Milky Way's surrounding space bubble.

Thanks in significant part to the Gaia project, the knowledge of the three-dimensional features of the Milky Way has significantly advanced in recent years.

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What Is Gaia?

Gaia is a European Space Agency mission to observe the sky with telescopes. By scanning around 1% of the 100 billion stars in the galaxy, it aims to provide the most comprehensive and accurate three-dimensional map of the Milky Way.

The following are the objectives of the European Space Agency's astronomical observatory mission:

Every star in its orbit around the galactic center will be detected by Gaia, and its motion will be measured with extreme precision.
To record the brightness and position of each star over time in five years.

Gaia was launched by a Russian Soyuz rocket. The Fregat upper stage sent Gaia into an Earth orbit measuring 109 × 109 miles (175 × 175 kilometers). Later, it fired again, resulting in a lengthy burn that took Gaia into an orbit of 214 × 598,200 miles (344 × 962, 690 kilometers) at a 15-degree inclination.

On Jan. 8, 2014, Gaia's engine fired to propel the spacecraft into a 163,000 × 439,000-mile (263,000 × 707,000-kilometer) halo orbit with a period of 180 days, putting it in its operating orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, approximately 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.

After four months of telescope alignment, calibration, and focusing, Gaia's five-year mission began on July 25, 2014.