A giant wave of gas lurks near our solar system
HONOLULU — The Earth and sun are right next to a wavy rope of star-forming gas, but astronomers only just noticed it. Many of the most well-known nearby stellar nurseries — places like the Orion Nebula — are actually strung along a continuous thread of gas that stretches roughly 9,000 light-years, researchers report. The thread resembles a sine wave, soaring above and below the disk of the galaxy by about 500 light-years, and at one point, coming within 1,000 light-years of our solar system. “Perhaps the oddest feature is how close it is to the sun, and we didn’t know about it before,” said Alyssa Goodman, a Harvard University astrophysicist who presented the results January 7 during a news conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The study was also published the same day in Nature. The team dubbed the newly found structure the Radcliffe Wave, Goodman said, in honor of both the institute where much of the work was done and early 20th...