The Shape of the Milky Way Is Warped and Twisted

Necroloth writes: You probably thought that if you were looking at our galaxy from the outside and at a distance, you would see a thin disc of stars that orbit around a central region, but the further away from the inner regions of the Milky Way you are, the less the pull of gravity. At the outer disc, the hydrogen atoms that make up the Milky Way's gas disc are, as a consequence, warped into an S-like shape, no longer pulled together in a thin plane. A group of astronomers from Australia and China have built their 'intuitive and accurate three-dimensional picture' by mapping 1339 classical Cepheids. There's a quick animation of the galaxy on the @NatureAstronomy twitter here. The study has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.