Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain Stuff. Lauren vogelbam here imagined standing in a dense woodland. How would you know the size and shape of that forest from your limited viewpoint? Not seeing the woods for the trees is a good analogy for what astronomer's experience when trying to assess the shape and size of our Milky Way galaxy. We occupy a small star system embedded inside
the Milky Ways disc. It's not like we can fly above the galactic plane to peek at our galaxies overall shape, although how cool would that be. Researchers, however, were determined to figure out the true shape of the Milky Way while staying embedded inside of it, and they have. Here's
how they did it. A team from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that's the n a o C and Macquarie University in Australia studied the one thousand, three D and thirty nine right pulsating stars called CEFIAD variables to create a three D map of the disc of our galaxy. What they found came as
a surprise. We live in a warped galaxy. Astronomer and research collaborator Richard de Grace said in a statement, we usually think of spiral galaxies as being quite flat, like Andromeda, which you can easily see through a telescope. But our galaxy isn't like Andromeda. It has an S shaped bend that gets more twisted the farther you move away from the galactic center. At this bend, the galaxy's gravitational pull becomes weaker, making it look like an old vinyl record
that's become warped. The study, which has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy, used data from NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer to precisely determine the locations of the cepheids throughout our galactic disc and turned them into a powerful tool to cut through the dust, gas, and other
stars that are ob scaring our view. Cheniadene, a researcher at n AOC and the lead author of the study, set in a press release it's notoriously difficult to determine distances from the Sun two parts of the Milky Ways outer gas disc without having a clear idea of what the disc actually looks like. However, we recently published a new catalog of well behaved variable stars known as classical cepheids, for which distances as accurate as three to five percent
can be determined. Sepheids are young stars that are four to twenty times the mass of our Sun, and they live fast and die young, consuming all their fuel in the span of only a few million years, all while burning up to one hundred thousand times brighter than our star. But what they lack in lifespan they make up or in regular pulses in brightness that can be used by astronomers to accurately measure their distances, and in this case, they acted as tracers to map out the warped milky
Way disc. Although the milky Way doesn't conform to the standard flat disc exhibited by other spiral galaxies like Andromeda, it's not alone. From earlier observations, the researchers identified a dozen other galaxies with a similar S shaped bend, which have given them a clue as to why our galaxy is warped. Blue Chow, co author of the study, said, combining our results with those other observations, we concluded that milky ways warped spival pattern is most likely caused by
torques or rotational forcing by the massive inner disc. Basically, the orbital motions in the massive central region of the Milky Way gravitationally bully the less massive outer regions, causing them to buckle and bend out of shape. Ultimately, this new finding could help us better understand the dynamics of orbital motions inside the Milky Way, thereby providing a glimpse of how our galaxy evolved. Today's episode was written by Ian O'Neil and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media
and How Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other warped topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.