You can see the bright disc of stars we call home if you step outside of the Milky Way. It seems that the rest of our universe is not as well-off as previously thought.
There is a map of the stars above and below the plane that shows the diffuse globe of gas, dark matter and stars that surround the plane. The ellipses of the Milky Way's halo are different in length and shape.
For decades, the general assumption has been that the stellar halo is spherical and isotropic, or the same in every direction.
The textbook picture of our universe embedded within a spherical volume of stars needs to be thrown out.
It's hard to figure out the shape of our universe. You're bobbing around in the middle of a large lake, trying to figure out the shape. The launch of the European Space Agency's Gaia telescope in 2013 gave us a detailed understanding of the three-dimensional shape of our universe.
The Earth's position around the sun is shared by Gaia. Changes in the telescope's position in the Solar System allow it to measure the parallax of objects in the Milky Way, which can be used to calculate the positions and movements of thousands of distant stars.
We now know that the disk of the Milky Way is warped. We know that the Milky Way has engaged in acts of cannibalism, one of the most prominent of which is believed to have been a collision with a galaxy we call the Gaia Sausage.
Scientists think that this collision created the stellar halo. There was a distinct population of stars in the halo of the Milky Way.
A team of scientists led by astronomer and PhD student Jiwon "Jesse" Han set out to gain a better understanding of the halo and the sausage.
Han says that the stellar halo is a way of showing the halo. The stellar halo is a great place to begin learning about the history of our own galaxy's halo and other halos.
The data on the chemical abundances of halo stars is unreliable. It is important information for mapping the relationship between the halo's stars because of their chemical abundances.
The survey called Hectochelle in the Halo at High Resolution, or H3 is a ground-based survey that has collected chemical abundance data on thousands of stars.
The researchers inferred the density of the stellar population with this data. The best fit for their data was a football shaped halo tilted 25 degrees.
The stars in the halo are part of a triaxial ellipsoid formation. It fits with the theory that the Gaia Sausage played a big part in creating the halo. The skewiff shape of the halo suggests that there was a collision.
Two pileups of stars were found far away from the center. The farthest distance the stars travel in their elliptical orbits is represented by these collections.
The apocenter is a point of slow-down and is the closest point to the center. The stars of the Gaia Sausage were flung out into two wild circles, slowing down at the apocenters and just making their new home.
The shape should have settled back into a sphere after a long time. The halo of dark matter binding the Milky Way appears to be highly tilted.
We have some new and exciting answers, but we have some new and exciting questions as well. Stronger constraints on the shape of the halo should be provided by future and ongoing surveys.
"What does the galaxy look like?" and "What does the stellar halo look like?" are some of the questions to be asked about our universe.
We are finally answering those questions with this line of research.
The research has appeared in a journal.
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