These new findings shed light on the warped, twisted shape of the galaxy's disk, researchers added. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy comprised of a bar-shaped core region surrounded by a flat disk ...

Our galaxy's Cepheid stars, superimposed onto a map of the Milky Way. Image Credit: Plot by J. Skowron / OGLE, Milky Way panorama by Serge Brunier That said, this galactic map quest is far from over.

"Somewhat to our surprise, we found that in 3D our collection of 1,339 Cepheid stars and the Milky Way's gas disk follow each other closely. This offers new insights into the formation of our home ...

Ultimately, Gaia will give us a moving, 3D model of our galaxy’s celestial choreography. With it, we can start to understand the physics underpinning this brilliant clump of gas and dust we call ...

The team released this visualization that shows radio sources from the new sky maps as an interactive 3D map. To check it out, first click on the link–then be patient as it may take a few ...

Using cutting-edge 3D galaxy maps and an innovative approach called field-level inference (FLI), researchers are uncovering ...

Astronomers have created a 3D map of our entire galaxy, pinpointing stars called Cepheids which pulsate and can be used to track distance and changes in space. When put into a map, the data showed ...

Now two studies, one published in February in Nature Astronomy and the other, this week in Science, confirm that our galaxy has a distinctive snaky curvature thanks to new 3D maps of the Milky Way.

The new stellar distance database allowed scientists to build a detailed 3D map of the Milky Way's gas disk. Cepheids are big and bright young stars. They live fast and die young.

The result is an unprecedented large-scale 3D map of the galaxy. And that map shows that the edges of the Milky Way bend slightly, giving it a warped S shape.

But before they could plot the galaxy’s Cepheids—and, by extension, the curves of the galaxy itself—the team had to find them. ... (1,000 more than a concurrent study) on a 3D galactic map.

That study looked at 1,339 Cepheids and created one of the most comprehensive 3D maps of the Milky Way, which showed that our home galaxy is twisted at its edges.