The new map has revealed a new substructure of the Milky Way’s outer disc using data from the Gaia space misison.
The new map has revealed a new substructure of the Milky Way's outer disc using data from the Gaia space misison. An international team of astronomers led by researcher Chervin Laporte of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB-IEEC) has revealed a new map of the Milky Way's outer disc using data from the Gaia space misison. The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . "Typically, this region of the Milky Way has remained poorly explored due to the intervening dust which severely obscures most of the Galactic midplane", says Chervin Laporte, first signer of the article. "While dust affects the luminosity of stars, it has no effect on their motion. As a result, one can use the stars' motion to perform a tomography of the Galaxy's outermost regions", adds the ICCUB researcher. The team analysed the Gaia motion data, available from December 2020, to identify coherent structures.
