"The Great Wave": There Is A Massive Ripple Across The Milky Way Shifting Stars By Hundreds Of Light

Astronomers have found more evidence that there is a massive ripple traveling through the Milky Way. They have found evidence that stars at the edge of the galactic disk are moving like people doing "the Wave" in a stadium. By tracking the motion of two types of stars, researchers have measured the property of this wave. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

We cannot see the Milky Way from the outside. Everything we know comes from mapping the stars around us with such precision that we can tell several things about our galaxy: we live in a spiral galaxy; the core of our galaxy is shaped like a bar rather than a spherical distribution of stars; the spiral arms are located in a thin disk, but the disk is not exactly flat.