A mysterious spiral object has been found swirling in the Milky Way

Astronomers peered into the center of the Milky Way and discovered what appears to be a miniature spiral galaxy orbiting a star.

The star – which lies about 26,000 light-years from Earth near the dense and dusty center of the galaxy – is about 32 times larger than the Sun and is inside a massive disk of gas known as the “protostar disk”.

These disks are pervasive in the universe, and they act as stellar fuels that help young stars grow into big, bright suns over millions of years. But astronomers have never seen anything like this: a miniature, dangerously rotating galaxy Near the center of our galaxy.

Observations of the mysterious object, about three times the size of Earth’s sun, were lurking outside the orbit of the spiral disk, published In a new study published May 30 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile, researchers found that the disk did not appear to be moving in a way that would explain its spiral shape. long live science.

On the contrary, the researchers explained that It looks like the disc has shaken By a close collision with another object – perhaps the mysterious object three times the size of the Sun, and still visible near it.

To verify this hypothesis, the team calculated dozens of possible orbits for the mysterious object, and ran simulations to see if any of those orbits could bring the object close enough to the helical stellar disk.

They found that if an object had followed a certain path, it could have passed through the disk earlier. About 12000 yearsdisturbing the dust enough to result in the spiral we see today.

“A good combination of analytical calculations, numerical simulations, and ALMA observations provides strong evidence that the helical arms in the disc were caused by the flight of the intruder,” explained Lu Xing, co-author of the study.

In addition to being the first direct images of a stellar disk in the galactic center, this study shows that exoplanets can make star disks in spiral shapes, seen naturally Only galactic wide.

Because the Milky Way’s center is millions of times more dense in stars than our galaxy’s neck, near-complete events like this are likely to occur at the galactic center regularly, the researchers say.

This means that the center of our galaxy can only be burdened with small solutions waiting to be discovered.