Latest Perseus Arm Stories

For decades, astronomers have been blind to what our galaxy, the Milky Way, really looks like. After all, we sit in the midst of it and can't step outside for a bird's eye view.Now, new images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are shedding light on the true structure of the Milky Way, revealing that it has just two major arms of stars instead of the four it was previously thought to possess."Spitzer has provided us with a starting point for rethinking the structure of the Milky...

Cambridge, MA -- The Perseus spiral arm - the nearest spiral arm in the Milky Way outside the Sun's orbit - lies only half as far from Earth as some previous studies had suggested. An international team of astronomers measured a highly accurate distance to the Perseus arm for the first time using a globe-spanning system of radio dishes known as the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), which offers the sharpest vision of any telescope in existence. Additional VLBA measurements will help...