Our Sun lies within 300 parsecs (around 1,000 light-years) of the 2,700-parsec- (around 9,000-light-year-) long sinusoidal chain of dense gas clouds known as the Radcliffe Wave. The structure’s wave-like shape was discovered using 3D dust mapping, but initial kinematic searches for oscillatory motion were inconclusive. According to new research, the Radcliffe Wave is oscillating through the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy while also drifting radially away from the Galactic center.
“By using the motion of baby stars born in the gaseous clouds along the Radcliffe Wave, we can trace the motion of their natal gas to show that the Radcliffe Wave is actually waving,” said Ralf Konietzka, a Ph.D. student at the Harvard & Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics.
In 2018, astronomers mapped out the 3D positions of the stellar nurseries in the Sun’s galactic neighborhood.
By combining brand-new data from ESA’s Gaia mission with the data-intensive ‘3D dust mapping’ technique, they noticed a pattern emerging, leading to the discovery of the Radcliffe Wave in 2020.
“It’s the largest coherent structure that we know of, and it’s really, really close to us,” said Dr. Catherine Zucker, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics.
“It’s been there the whole time. We just didn’t know about it, because we couldn’t build these high-resolution models of the distribution of gaseous clouds near the Sun, in 3D.”
The 3D dust map clearly showed that the Radcliffe Wave existed, but no measurements available then were good enough to see if the wave was moving.
But in 2022, using a newer release of Gaia data, the astronomers assigned 3D motions to the young star clusters in the Radcliffe Wave.
With the clusters’ positions and motions in hand, they were able to determine that the entire Radcliffe Wave is indeed waving, moving like what physicists call a ‘traveling wave.’
“A traveling wave is the same phenomenon we see in a…
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