Astronomers Promise Complete Picture of Milky Way

The VLBA observations measured the distance to a region where new stars are being formed. Such regions include areas where molecules of water and methanol act as natural amplifiers of radio signals — masers, the radio-wave equivalent of lasers for light waves. This effect makes the radio signals bright and readily observable with radio telescopes.

“The Milky Way has hundreds of such star-forming regions that include masers, so we have plenty of ‘mileposts’ to use for our mapping project, but this one is special. We’re looking all the way through the Milky Way, past its center, way out into the other side,” said the MPIfR’s Karl Menten.

The astronomers’ goal is to finally reveal what our own Galaxy looks like if we could leave it, travel outward perhaps a million light-years, and view it face-on, rather than along the plane of its disk. This task will require many more observations and much painstaking work, but, the scientists say, the tools for the job now are in hand. How long will it take?

“Within the next 10 years, we should have a fairly complete picture,” Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CFA) predicted.

Sanna, Menten, and Reid worked with Thomas Dame of the CfA and Andreas Brunthaler of MPIfR. The team reported their findings in the 13 October issue of the journal Science.

The Long Baseline Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.