A peculiar object in the shape of a spiral was discovered around the Milky Way's core

 

Although it appears to be a small galaxy, it is only a single extremely massive star.

 

Astronomers have peered into the center of the Milky Way and discovered what seems to be a miniature spiral galaxy, swirling daintily around a single giant star. This discovery is akin to cracking open a cosmic Russian nesting doll, which was made when astronomers peered into the center of the Milky Way.

 

The star is about 32 times as massive as the sun and resides amid a vast disk of spinning plasma known as a "protostellar disk." Its distance from Earth is around 26,000 light-years, and its location is near the dense and dusty galactic center. (The width of the disk itself is around 4,000 astronomical units, equivalent to 4,000 times the distance that separates Earth and the sun.)

 

These disks may be found all around the cosmos and act as a fuel for budding stars, allowing them to mature into enormous, luminous suns for millions of years. However, scientists have never seen anything like this: a small galaxy that orbits dangerously near the center of our galaxy.

 

What caused this tiny spiral to appear, and are there any other examples in the world? According to a new study published on May 30 in the journal Nature Astronomy, the answers may lie in a mysterious object approximately three times as big as the sun that orbits the Earth. This object is said to lurk just outside the spiral disk's orbit.

 

The researchers observed that the disk does not appear to be moving in a way that would give it a natural spiral structure by using high-definition observations acquired with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile. These observations were made in Chile. They wrote that the disk appears to have been stirred up by a near-collision with another body, which may have been the unexplained item still visible nearby and is approximately the size of three suns.

 

The group devised a dozen possible orbits for the enigmatic item to test this concept. Then they used a computer program to determine if any of those orbits could have gotten the object close enough to the protostellar disk to spiral. They discovered that the item could have skimmed past the disk approximately 12,000 years ago if it had followed a particular path. This would have agitated the dust enough to produce the brilliant spiral form that can be seen today.

 

"The nice match among analytical calculations, the numerical simulation, and the ALMA observations provide robust evidence that the spiral arms in the disk are relics of the flyby of the intruding object," study co-author Lu Xing, an associate researcher from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement. Xing was involved in the research as part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

This study provides the first direct photos of a protostellar disk in the heart of the galaxy and demonstrates that external objects can whip stellar disks into spiral shapes, which is generally only observed on the galactic scale.

 

According to the researchers, because the core of the Milky Way contains millions of times more stars than our region of the galaxy, it is quite likely that close calls similar to this one take place in the galactic core on a reasonably regular basis. This indicates that the center of our galaxy may contain an abundance of tiny spirals that are just waiting to be discovered. It's possible that scientists won't get to the core of this cosmic jigsaw puzzle for a very, very long time.

Article source : https://www.livescience.com/spiral-disk-galactic-center

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