Sentences with phrase «galactic plane»
The phrase "galactic plane" refers to an imaginary, flat surface that runs through the middle of a galaxy, like our Milky Way. It's where most of the stars, gas, and dust are concentrated, creating a kind of "highway" for celestial activity. Scientists often study this plane to better understand the structure and evolution of galaxies. Full definition
Collectively, the three telescopes will monitor a million stars in the Milky Way, its star - packed galactic plane, along with a hundred nearby galaxies.
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The Spitzer data is a composite of several infrared bands from two Spitzer Space Telescope surveys, MIPSGAL and GLIMPSE, of the inner galactic plane, as explained in more detail here.
It scans the center of our galaxy and the entire galactic plane.
In 1957, astronomers surveying galactic hydrogen gas discovered that the Milky Way is not flat but warped near its edges like a fedora hat, with one side of its spiral disk curving as much as 20,000 light years above the main galactic plane and the other dipping a little less below it.
NASA, that notorious spoiler of doomsday prophecies, had this to say about the imminent non-apocalypse: «There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible.
«I projected the nearby brown dwarfs onto the galactic plane and suddenly realized: half of the sky is practically empty!
But it is difficult to predict exactly how much emission there would be high above the galactic plane.
Hanging just above the galactic plane, the Black Widow Nebula is a cloud of dust, gas and stars about 10,000 light years from Earth.
More recently, there have also been predictions of a disk of dark matter that would reside in the galactic plane, co-rotating with the Milky Way itself.
But in an analysis of the movements of some 300 stars located at least 6,000 light - years beyond the galactic plane, Christian Moni Bidin, an astronomer at the University of Concepción in Chile, and his colleagues conclude that there is «no compelling evidence» for such a dark disk.
Two 30,000 light - year - long blobs called Fermi bubbles have been discovered on either side of our galactic plane.
The bright center band in the above image represents heated interstellar dust as seen along the galactic plane of the Milky Way.
Clouds of star - forming material at very high latitudes away from the galactic plane are rare and, in general, are not expected to form stars.
The researchers counted stars on photographic plates taken in both directions by a telescope at Mount Palomar, California, and concluded that the Sun must lie about 68 light years above the galactic plane.
The result confirms that we live close to the galactic plane, as the Galaxy's disc is about 1300 light years thick in our vicinity.
But estimates for the much smaller distance from the Sun to the galactic plane — an imaginary plane bisecting the Galaxy like the layer of jam in a sponge cake — have failed to match up.
The ratio of the two depends on exactly where we are; if the Sun lies above the galactic plane, then assuming the disc is symmetrical there will be fewer stars above us than below.
They found that stars closer to the centre of the galaxy are spreading outwards above and below the galactic plane while stars further from the centre are squashing inwards.
The CoRoT satellite searches for planets by applying the transit method, monitoring up to 12 000 stars in the galactic plane for 150 days in each observing run.
Here is a map showing many of the dark nebula regions within 2000 light years plotted onto the galactic plane.
As a result, many specific structural features of the spiral arms are not well known, especially when compared with other spirals observed outside the Milky Way such as Andromeda (which is located a few million ly above the galactic plane of obscuring dust in the Milky Way's disk.
Every point on this map is an actual star listed in the Hipparcos catalog plotted onto the galactic plane.
Because of all the intervening dust and gas lying in the galaxy it is very hard to see much beyond this distance in the galactic plane.
The map is orientated so that we are looking straight down at the galactic plane with the Sun at the centre of the map.
Based on knowing these common proper motions and radial velocities, Alpha Centauri will continue to gradually brighten, passing just north of the Southern Cross or Crux, before moving northwest and up towards the present celestial equator and away from the galactic plane.
The large cloud looms in the very center of this image of the galactic plane from Spitzer.
They are arranged in a nearly spherical halo around the Milky Way, with relatively few toward the galactic plane but a heavy concentration toward the centre.
The electric vectors tend to lie preferentially along the galactic plane, though there are areas where the distribution is more complicated.
The RCW catalog breaks this up into the Lagoon nebula proper (RCW 146a), the much fainter Gum 74b nebula next to it (RCW 146b) and the three smaller Sharpless nebulae Sh 2 - 29, Sh 2 - 31 and Sh 2 - 32 further below the galactic plane (RCW 146c).
BL is unquestionably the most ambitious of the two endeavors, a 10 year mission seeking to scour the closest 1,000,000 stars on the galactic plane for signals that may constitute signs of intelligent life.
The thick disk is generally formed of old stars that may lie several thousand light - years (ly) above or below the galactic plane, unlike thin disk stars such as Sol which typically lie within a thousand ly.
This allowed the astronomical community to understand why globular clusters were not visible in the galactic plane (their light was being absorbed) and allowed for a better calibration of distance indicators.
Although two of the three newly discovered FRBs were discovered relatively close to the galactic plane, their dispersion measures and redshifts suggests an extragalactic origin.
The large cloud looms in the center of this image of the galactic plane from Spitzer.
Astronomers searching for signs of hot gas in the Local Chimney with the NASA FUSE satellite have detected hot gas that is coming towards the Solar System, which could be part of a fountain that is falling back onto the galactic plane.
The cluster lies close to the galactic plane and is approaching us at 147 km / s.
In the Monoceros patch observed by the SDSS team, the ring appears to extend over 16,000 ly (5,000 parsecs or pc) above and below the galactic plane, with stars below the plane extending about 2,000 pc further from galactic center than those located above the plane; it also appear to be somewhat less than 13,000 ly (4,000 pc) wide.
The collection spans 300 million light years, stretching both above and below the galactic plane like an ogre hiding behind a lamppost.
Their magnum opus, however, is the time they tricked Frontier Developments into teleporting them 16,000 light years outside of the galactic plane.
Accordingly; as our solar system passes through the more dense parts of the Milky Way galaxy found in the arms and along the center of the galactic plane, it is subject to increasing amounts of GCRs.
Rampino, M.R., and R.B. Stothers, 1984: Terrestrial mass extinctions, cometary impacts and the sun's motion perpendicular to the galactic plane.
Stothers, R.B., 1985: Terrestrial record of the Solar System's oscillation about the galactic plane.