Astronomers say mysterious galactic ‘wave’ may have once washed over Earth - Stretching across the night sky, a recently found chain of star-forming clouds is undulating through the galaxy
Astronomers say mysterious galactic ‘wave’ may have once washed over Earth - Stretching across the night sky, a recently found chain of star-forming clouds is undulating through the galaxy
AI: Astronomers have discovered a Radcliffe wave, the largest coherent structure in our galaxy, made up of star-forming clouds and stretching over 9,000 light-years. A new paper in the journal Nature reports that this structure oscillates as it rises and falls above the plane of the galaxy. This phenomenon is called a traveling wave. It is believed that the solar system went through a Radcliffe wave about 13 million years ago, which may have affected life on Earth due to an increased number of exploding stars in these regions. The research was made possible by data from the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft, which helped create an accurate 3D map of the stars and gas in our sector of the galaxy. The Radcliffe wave may be the basis of the spiral arm of our galaxy closest to the Sun. The cause of the wave's oscillations could be a collision with a dwarf galaxy or a sequence of supernova stellar explosions.