Visualization of the Radcliffe Wave: a massive, wave-shaped gaseous structure made up of stellar nurseries, forming one of the largest coherent structures ever observed in our galaxy. This image, taken from the World Wide Telescope, represents the study data overlaid on an artist’s illustration of the Milky Way and our sun. Credit: Alyssa Goodman / Harvard University
Interconnected stellar nurseries form the largest gaseous structure ever observed in the Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomers at Harvard University have discovered a monolithic, wave-shaped gaseous structure — the largest ever seen in our galaxy — made up of interconnected stellar nurseries. Dubbed the “Radcliffe Wave” in honor of the collaboration’s home base, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the discovery transforms a 150-year-old vision of nearby stellar nurseries as an expanding ring into one featuring an undulating, star-forming filament that reaches trillions of miles above and below the galactic disk.
“No astronomer expected that we live next to a giant, wave-like collection of gas — or that it forms the local arm of the Milky Way.” — Alyssa Goodman
The work, published in Nature on January 7, 2020, was enabled by a new analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, launched in 2013 with the mission of precisely measuring the position, distance, and motion of the stars. The research team’s innovative approach combined the super-accurate data from Gaia with other measurements to construct a detailed, 3D map of interstellar matter in the Milky Way, and noticed an unexpected pattern in the spiral arm closest to Earth.
The researchers discovered a long, thin structure, about 9,000 light-years long and 400 light-years wide, with a wave-like shape, cresting 500 light-years above and below the mid-plane of our galaxy’s disk. The Wave includes many of the stellar nurseries that were thought to form part of “Gould’s Belt,” a band of star-forming regions believed to be oriented in a ring around the sun.
“No astronomer expected that we live next to a giant, wave-like collection of gas — or that it forms the local arm of the Milky Way,” said Alyssa Goodman, the Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy, research associate at the Smithsonian Institution, and co-director of the Science Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. “We were completely shocked when we first realized how long and straight the Radcliffe Wave is, looking down on it from above in 3D — but how sinusoidal it is when viewed from Earth. The Wave’s very existence is forcing us to rethink our understanding of the Milky Way’s 3D structure.”
“No astronomer expected that we live next to a giant, wave-like collection of gas — or that it forms the local arm of the Milky Way,” said Harvard Professor Alyssa Goodman (left), standing with graduate student Catherine Zucker, a key member of the team. Credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
“Gould and Herschel both observed bright stars forming in an arc projected on the sky, so for a long time, people have been trying to figure out if these molecular clouds actually form a ring in 3D,” said João Alves, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Vienna and 2018‒2019 Radcliffe Fellow. “Instead, what we’ve observed is the largest coherent gas structure we know of in the galaxy, organized not in a ring but in a massive, undulating filament. The sun lies only 500 light-years from the Wave at its closest point. It’s been right in front of our eyes all the time, but we couldn’t see it until now.”
The new, 3D map shows our galactic neighborhood in a new light, giving researchers a revised view of the Milky Way and opening the door to other major discoveries.
“We don’t know what causes this shape, but it could be like a ripple in a pond, as if something extraordinarily massive landed in our galaxy,” said Alves. “What we do know is that our sun interacts with this structure. It passed by a festival of supernovae as it crossed Orion 13 million years ago, and in another 13 million years it will cross the structure again, sort of like we are ‘surfing the wave.’”
An insider’s view of the galaxy
Disentangling structures in the “dusty” galactic neighborhood within which we sit is a longstanding challenge in astronomy. In earlier studies, the research group of Douglas Finkbeiner, professor of astronomy and physics at Harvard, pioneered advanced statistical techniques to map the 3D distribution of dust using vast surveys of stars’ colors. Armed with new data from Gaia, Harvard graduate students Catherine Zucker and Joshua Speagle recently augmented these techniques, dramatically improving astronomers’ ability to measure distances to star-forming regions. That work, led by Zucker, is published in the Astrophysical Journal.
“We suspected there might be larger structures that we just couldn’t put in context. So, to create an accurate map of our solar neighborhood, we combined observations from space telescopes like Gaia with astrostatistics, data visualization, and numerical simulations,” explained Zucker, a National Science Foundation graduate fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Zucker played a key role in compiling the largest-ever catalog of accurate distances to local stellar nurseries — the basis for the 3D map used in the study. She has set herself the goal of painting a new picture of the Milky Way, near and far.
“We pulled this team together so we could go beyond processing and tabulating the data to actively visualizing it — not just for ourselves but for everyone. Now, we can literally see the Milky Way with new eyes,” she said.
“Studying stellar births is complicated by imperfect data. We risk getting the details wrong, because if you’re confused about distance, you’re confused about size,” said Finkbeiner.
Goodman agreed, “All of the stars in the universe, including our sun, are formed in dynamic, collapsing, clouds of gas and dust. But determining how much mass the clouds have, how large they are, has been difficult, because these properties depend on how far away the cloud is.”
A universe of data
According to Goodman, scientists have been studying dense clouds of gas and dust between the stars for more than 100 years, zooming in on these regions with ever-higher resolution. Before Gaia, there was no data set expansive enough to reveal the galaxy’s structure on large scales. Since its launch in 2013, the space observatory has enabled measurements of the distances to one billion stars in the Milky Way.
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The flood of data from Gaia served as the perfect testbed for innovative, new statistical methods that reveal the shape of local stellar nurseries and their connection to the Milky Way’s galactic structure. Alves came to Radcliffe to work with Zucker and Goodman, as they anticipated the flood of data from Gaia would enhance the Finkbeiner group’s “3D Dust Mapping” technology enough to reveal the distances of local stellar nurseries. But they had no idea they would find the Radcliffe Wave.
The Finkbeiner, Alves, and Goodman groups collaborated closely on this data-science effort. The Finkbeiner group developed the statistical framework needed to infer the 3D distribution of the dust clouds; the Alves group contributed deep expertise on stars, star formation, and Gaia; and the Goodman group developed the 3D visualizations and analytic framework, called “glue,” that allowed the Radcliffe Wave to be seen, explored, and quantitatively described.
This study was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (grant no. 1650114, AST-1614941), the Harvard Data Science Initiative, NASA through ADAP (grant no. NNH17AE75I), and a Hubble Fellowship (grant HST-HF2-51367.001-A) awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555.
References:
“A Galactic-scale gas wave in the solar neighborhood” by João Alves, Catherine Zucker, Alyssa A. Goodman, Joshua S. Speagle, Stefan Meingast, Thomas Robitaille, Douglas P. Finkbeiner, Edward F. Schlafly and Gregory M. Green, 7 January 2020, Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1874-z
“A 3D Dust Map Based on Gaia, Pan-STARRS 1, and 2MASS” by Gregory M. Green, Edward Schlafly, Catherine Zucker, Joshua S. Speagle and Douglas Finkbeiner, 13 December 2019, The Astrophysical Journal. DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab5362
The articles, analyzed data (on the Harvard Dataverse), statistical code, interactive figures, videos, and WorldWide Telescope tour are all freely available to everyone through a dedicated website.
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).
Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.
The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory—including some of the FDS computer’s software code—isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide affected the code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22.5 hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification had worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.
During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.
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Osoyoos commuters can celebrate Earth Day as the Town joins in on a national commuter challenge known as “Leg Day,” entering a chance to win sustainable transportation prizes.
The challenge, from Earth Day Canada, is to record 10 sustainable commutes taken without a car.
“Cars are one of the biggest contributors to gas emissions in Canada,” reads an Earth Day Canada statement. “That’s why, Earth Day Canada is launching the national Earth Day is Leg Day Challenge.”
So far, over 42.000 people have participated in the Leg Day challenge.
Participants could win an iGo electric bike, public transportation for a year, or a gym membership.
The Town of Osoyoos put out a message Monday promoting joining the national program.
For more information on the Leg Day challenge click here.
Verticillium wilt is a problem for a lot of crops in Manitoba, including canola, sunflowers and alfalfa.
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In potatoes, the fungus Verticillium dahlia is the main cause of potato early die complex. In a 2021 interview with the Co-operator, Mario Tenuta, University of Manitoba soil scientist and main investigator with the Canadian Potato Early Dying Network, suggested the condition can cause yield loss of five to 20 per cent. Other research from the U.S. puts that number as high as 50 per cent.
It also becomes a marketing issue when stunted spuds fall short of processor preferences.
Verticillium in potatoes can significantly reduce yield and, being soil-borne, is difficult to manage.
Preliminary research results suggest earlier planting of risk-prone fields could reduce losses, in part due to colder soil temperatures earlier in the season.
Unlike other potato fungal issues that can be addressed with foliar fungicide, verticillium hides in the soil.
“Commonly we use soil fumigation and that’s very expensive,” said Julie Pasche, plant pathologist with North Dakota State University.
There are options. In 2017, labels expanded for the fungicide Aprovia, Syngenta’s broad-spectrum answer for leaf spots or powdery mildews in various horticulture crops. In-furrow verticillium suppression for potatoes was added to the label.
There has also been interest in biofumigation. Mustard has been tagged as a potential companion crop for potatoes, thanks to its production of glucosinolate and the pathogen- and pest-inhibiting substance isothiocyanate.
Last fall, producers heard that a new, sterile mustard variety specifically designed for biofumigation had been cleared for sale in Canada, although seed supplies for 2024 are expected to be slim. AAC Guard was specifically noted for its effectiveness against verticillium wilt.
Timing is everything
Researchers at NDSU want to study the advantage of natural plant growth patterns.
“What we’d like to look at are other things we can do differently, like verticillium fertility management and water management, as well as some other areas and how they may be affected by planting date,” Pasche said.
The idea is to find a chink in the fungus’s life cycle.
Verticillium infects roots in the spring. From there, it colonizes the plant, moving through the root vascular tissue and into the stem. This is the cause of in-season vegetative wilting, Pasche noted.
As it progresses, plant cells die, leaving behind tell-tale black dots on dead tissue. Magnification of those dots reveals what look like dark bunches of grapes — tiny spheres containing melanized hyphae, a resting form of the fungus called microsclerotia.
The dark colour comes from melanin, the same pigment found in human skin. This pigmentation protects the microsclerotia from ultraviolet light.
