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Astronomers identify a broken arm

The galaxy that is home to our planet and our entire solar system is clearly the Milky Way, a huge group of stars and planets that takes the classic spiral shape with many arms converging toward a common center.

Belonging to this galaxy actually has small downsides, which makes it hard to notice, not in terms of what it’s made of, just think of the amazing 2.2 gigapixel images that astrophotographer Bartosz Wojczynski took recently, but in terms of getting a panoramic view of himself .

Unexpected novelty

Precisely because of this difficulty in observing it in a broad and complete way, you can still come across some unexpected surprises, such as those immortalized using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope Before retiring in January 2020 by crossing the restriction with these people released by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.

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The result of this research work conducted by Caltech Group has been published in Astronomy and astrophysics It consists of revealing a broken arm in our galaxy, detailing it would be an arc arm which should normally have an inclination of about 12 degrees, but within its structure there is a dense cluster of stars with an inclination of up to 60 degrees, a kind of compound fracture according to Michael Kuhn, an astrophysicist at the Institute of California Tech and lead author of the article.

However, this is an expected feature, and such formations are often identified in other spiral galaxies, which is why the same situation was also expected with our Milky Way, which has already been observed now.

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