- #1
wolram
Gold Member
Dearly Missed
- 4,446
- 558
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13043-milky-ways-two-stellar-halos-have-opposing-spins.html
We call it home, but the Milky Way can still surprise us. It does not have just one halo of stars, as we thought, but two. The finding calls into question our theories for how our galaxy formed.
Daniela Carollo at the Torino Observatory in Italy and her colleagues were measuring the metal content and motion of 20,000 stars in the Milky Way, observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, when they made their discovery.
They found that the halo can be divided into two distinct regions, rotating in opposite directions, and containing stars of different chemical composition. "We really weren't expecting to see anything like this," says Carollo.
The team found that the inner halo is flattened and extends out to about 4.6 x 1017 kilometres from the galactic centre, rotating at 20 kilometres per second, in the same sense that the Sun travels round the galactic centre. The outer halo is spherical, stretching out to over 6.0 x 1017 kilometres and spinning in the opposite direction at about 70 kilometres per second.
It seems odd that no one noticed this in the past, but Carollo points out that while astronomers had found a few stars that appeared to be moving in the "wrong direction", they did not have enough data to conclude that the halo was split into two parts.
Odd is the word, intuitively it seems wrong to me, would not all gravitating bodies lock after millions of years?
We call it home, but the Milky Way can still surprise us. It does not have just one halo of stars, as we thought, but two. The finding calls into question our theories for how our galaxy formed.
Daniela Carollo at the Torino Observatory in Italy and her colleagues were measuring the metal content and motion of 20,000 stars in the Milky Way, observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, when they made their discovery.
They found that the halo can be divided into two distinct regions, rotating in opposite directions, and containing stars of different chemical composition. "We really weren't expecting to see anything like this," says Carollo.
The team found that the inner halo is flattened and extends out to about 4.6 x 1017 kilometres from the galactic centre, rotating at 20 kilometres per second, in the same sense that the Sun travels round the galactic centre. The outer halo is spherical, stretching out to over 6.0 x 1017 kilometres and spinning in the opposite direction at about 70 kilometres per second.
It seems odd that no one noticed this in the past, but Carollo points out that while astronomers had found a few stars that appeared to be moving in the "wrong direction", they did not have enough data to conclude that the halo was split into two parts.
Odd is the word, intuitively it seems wrong to me, would not all gravitating bodies lock after millions of years?
Last edited: