Milky Way is a Barred Spiral
Astronomy Tuesday, August 16, 2005 . This is a SciScoop post by apsmith
Thanks to a survey by the Spitzer Space Telescope, Ed Churchwell of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has concluded that our galaxy has a long bar through the middle, quite different from a normal spiral galaxy. The bar contains relatively old stars, and is roughly 27,000 light years long, running at a 45-degree angle to the Sun-Galactic center axis. Barred spirals of this sort are rare, but there are other examples out there; the Milky Way may resemble M58.
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2 Responses to Milky Way is a Barred Spiral
chad
August 16th, 2005 at 11:41 pm
The picture in the article really helps make sense of this whole thing.
telescopeguy
August 18th, 2005 at 7:03 pm
Yeah, I caught that article too. It says that barred spiral galaxies "of this sort" are rare. That’s kind of ambiguous, since I can’t figure out whether the author meant a particular kind of barred spiral, or barred spiral galaxies in general.
Another piece by a different author from the same day said that barred spirals are not uncommon at all.
So which is it??
Beyond that, I’d like to know why galaxies have the formal variation they do- spirals against ellipticals against irregulars, with every intermixing in between (not usually mentioned in the typology). What causes the bar phenomenon? Could it be something having to do with magnetic fields, their breakup and inversion? Does it covary with the distribution of arms and globular clusters?