The diameter of the Milky Way is about 654.38+ million to 654.38+08 billion light years. The solar system is far from the center of the Milky Way and close to galactic plane. So all the spiral arms we see are overlapped and projected on the celestial sphere, which is indistinguishable. 2 1 Nanjing university announced that the famous magazine Scientific American recently published a cover article written by M Reid, an academician of the American Academy of Sciences, and Professor Zheng from the School of Astronomy and Space Sciences of the university, summarizing the international team led by them and Professor K Menten from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.
Using the very long baseline interferometry technology, the team accurately measured the distance and self-motion of nearly 200 massive stars on the silver disk, obtained the structure of the spiral arms of the Milky Way, the position of the solar system and its rotation speed around the center of the Milky Way, and drew a brand-new structure map of the Milky Way, with the scale of 65438+ million× 65438+million light years. This map is by far the most accurate structure map of the Milky Way.
"This most accurate structural map of the Milky Way so far clearly shows that the Milky Way is a bar-spiral galaxy with four spiral arms, which basically solves the long-standing unresolved scientific problem of how many spiral arms there are in the Milky Way." Zheng, one of the authors of the paper, said.
At the beginning of the 20th century, 22 astronomers from China, the United States, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan and Poland planned and established a major scientific project "A survey of the galaxy rods and spiral arms". In this project, the distance and self-motion of maser source in massive stars are directly measured by using very long baseline interference array with equivalent aperture of earth diameter and geometric triangular parallax method.
Zheng introduced that since 2003, the research team has measured the distance and self-motion of maser sources in 163 massive stars on the silver disk, and combined with 37 maser sources measured by other groups in the world, * * * obtained the distance and self-motion of nearly 200 massive stars in the Milky Way. The distribution of these massive stars on the silver disk clearly outlines four main spiral arms, namely Perseus arm, Sagittarius-bottom arm, rectangular ruler arm and shield-Centauri arm. The research team combined the observation data of infrared, carbon monoxide and a large number of young celestial bodies, and finally drew the structural map of the Milky Way, which is a rod-spiral galaxy with four spiral arms.
The structure map of the Milky Way drawn by Zheng He Reed of the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard, USA.
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