Cattell could be a new arm of the Milky Way

Nicknamed “Catell”, the expanse of dust and gas hanging from the outer edge of the Milky Way has been observed thanks to the FAST five hundred-meter aperture spherical radio telescope, located in Guizhou Province, China.

Systematic studies of a region of the sky known as Cygnus-X, a massive star-forming region located about 4,500 light-years away, have allowed Keeping Q And his colleagues noticed clouds of hydrogen gas that seemed to be lagging behind.

By combining observations from FAST, which sees the universe through the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum useful for monitoring clouds of cold hydrogen-containing gas, with data from a telescope in Germany and another in Australia, the researchers were able to map “Cattail,” which spans over It is approximately 3,600 light-years away at a distance of about 68,000 light-years from Earth, making it the largest and most distant gas giant filament ever seen.

Team Appreciate mass 65000 soles and its true range could be greater, It may be 16,000 light-years across. They detailed their findings in an article published August 4 in the preprint database arXiv, accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The Milky Way is a giant spiral galaxy cIt has a central bulge surrounded by four twisting arms that contain stars, gas and dust: two main arms called Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus, and two smaller arms called Norma and Sagittarius, according to NASA. Earth lies on a branch of the arc’s arm called the Orion Spur.

Cattail is located at the outer edge of the Milky Way, about three times us from the galactic center.

Top of page: Artist’s impression of the Milky Way. Our puerperal galaxy is organized into broad spiral arms. (Image credit: NASA/Adler/U. Chicago/Wesleyan/JPL-Caltech)