The Scutum-Centaurus arms sweeps out to the right and above, going behind the center to the far side. The Sun is directly below the galactic center, near the Orion Spur. The most current map of the Milky Way is shown in an artist’s representation. The frosting layer in the middle representing the thin disk would be about 4 cm thick, which is a thick frosting layer!).Īlso, to this scale, the Sun would be 1.3 meters out from the center, roughly halfway from the center to the edge.īut where is it vertically in the cake? Right in the center of that frosting layer, or off by a bit up or down? To give you a sense of scale, if the cake is 10 cm high (the top-to-bottom thickness of the thick disk), then to scale with the Milky Way the cake itself would be a circle 5 meters in diameter! That's a very wide, flat cake. If the two sponge layers are exactly the same height, then the galactic midplane would slice horizontally exactly through the center of the frosting layer between them. The frosting is the thin disk, and the cake sponge is the thick one. Imagine the galaxy is a two-layer cake with frosting in between the layers. There are actually two disks to the galaxy: a thick disk and a thin disk, with the thin disk right in the middle of the thick one. Credit: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF Galactic north is up, and the midplane cuts exactly halfway through the disk. We are inside the galaxy, so this image is like looking back toward the galaxy’s center, with the disk extending behind us. An all-sky infrared image of the galaxy remapped so that the flat disk of the galaxy runs right through the center, and the center is the galactic center.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |