Astronomers peered into the center of the Milky Way and found a small spiral galaxy around a large star.
The star is about 32 times the size of the sun and sits within a large disk of gas. 4,000 times the distance between Earth and the sun ismeasured by the disk.
Young stars grow into big, bright suns as a result of the stellar fuel served by such disks. Astronomers have never seen one like this before, a tiny, tiny, perilously close to the center of our own galaxy.
The Hubble image captures the grand spiral of the universe.
Are there more mini-spirals out there? According to a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, an object about three times the size of the sun may be the answer.
The disk doesn't seem to be moving in a way that would give it a natural spiral shape according to the researchers. They wrote that the disk seems to have been stirred up by a close encounter with another body.
The team ran a simulation to see if any of the 12 potential orbits could have brought the object close to the disk. The object could have skimmed past the disk about 12,000 years ago if it followed a specific path.
The study shows that external objects can whip stellar disks into spiral shapes that are only seen on the galactic scale.
It's likely that near-miss events like this happen frequently in the center of the Milky Way because it's so dense with stars. Our galaxy's center may be full of small spirals only to be discovered. The center of the doll may not be reached by scientists for a long time.
It was originally published on Live Science
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