The Bones of the Milky Way

Author(s)

Alyssa A. Goodman, J. F. Alves, C. Beaumont, R. A. Benjamin, M. A. Borkin, A. Burkert, T. M. Dame, J. Kauffmann, Thomas Robitaille

Abstract

The Milky Way is typically thought of as a spiral galaxy, but our

understanding of its detailed structure remains vague thanks to our

observational vantage point within its disk. Most of what we do know

about the Milky Way's three-dimensional geometry comes from

velocity-resolved observations of gas and stars. But, recently, it has

become possible to combine exquisitely sensitive observations of dust

with more traditional kinematically-resolved observations of gas to

reveal totally new structures within the Milky Way. In this talk, I will

explain why we now believe that some extraordinarily long so-called

"infrared dark clouds" are in fact the "bones" of the Galaxy, marking

out the true mid-plane of its disk to within less than a few parsecs. We

call the long features "bones" thanks to recent numerical simulations of

spiral galaxies that show a network of over-dense filaments within and

between the arms that resemble an endoskeleton for a galaxy. The talk

will highlight how both large surveys and new visualization tools have

been critical in this investigation. By way of example, I will argue

that the "Nessie" Infrared Dark Cloud is a nearly-continuous,

many-hundreds-of-pc-long, ~pc-thick, structure, lying within a few pc of

the mid-plane of the MIlky Way.

Organisation(s)

Department of Astrophysics

External organisation(s)

California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Medizinische Universität Wien, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Harvard University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie

Volume

221

Publication date

01-2013

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

103004 Astrophysics, 103003 Astronomy

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/the-bones-of-the-milky-way(15d322b8-bc13-4394-a5ed-a8af97026ba4).html