astronomy Astronomy () is a natural science that studies astronomical object, celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and chronology of the Universe, evolution. Objects of interest ...

, the Sagittarius Stream is a long, complex structure made of

star A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night, but their immense distances from Earth make ...

s that wrap around the

Milky Way The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked ey ...

galaxy A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar Sys ...

in an

orbit In celestial mechanics, an orbit is the curved trajectory of an object such as the trajectory of a planet around a star, or of a natural satellite around a planet, or of an artificial satellite around an object or position in space such a ...

that nearly crosses the

galactic pole The galactic coordinate system is a celestial coordinate system in spherical coordinates, with the Sun as its center, the primary direction aligned with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the fundamental plane parallel to an ap ...

s. It consists of tidally stripped stars from the

Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy The Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy (Sgr dSph), also known as the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy (Sgr dE or Sag DEG), is an elliptical loop-shaped satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It contains four globular clusters ...

, resulting from the process of

merging Merge, merging, or merger may refer to: Concepts * Merge (traffic), the reduction of the number of lanes on a road * Merge (linguistics), a basic syntactic operation in generative syntax in the Minimalist Program * Merger (politics), the co ...

with the Milky Way over a period of billions of years. This stellar stream was originally proposed in 1995 by

Donald Lynden-Bell Donald Lynden-Bell CBE FRS (5 April 1935 – 6 February 2018) was a British theoretical astrophysicist. He was the first to determine that galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centres, and that such black holes power quasars. Ly ...

after analyzing the distribution of

globular cluster A globular cluster is a spheroidal conglomeration of stars. Globular clusters are bound together by gravity, with a higher concentration of stars towards their centers. They can contain anywhere from tens of thousands to many millions of memb ...

s in the Milky Way. The actual structure was identified by Newberg and associates (2002) plus Majewski and associates (2003) using data from the

2MASS The Two Micron All-Sky Survey, or 2MASS, was an astronomical survey of the whole sky in infrared light. It took place between 1997 and 2001, in two different locations: at the U.S. Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins, Arizona, a ...

and SDSS surveys. In 2006, Belokurov and his collaborators found that the Sagittarius Stream has two branches. When the progenitor object was shredded apart during the interaction, it sent oscillations (analogous to sound waves) through the Milky Way

spiral arm Spiral galaxies form a class of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work ''The Realm of the Nebulae''star A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night, but their immense distances from Earth make ...

distributions, above and below the

Solar System The Solar System Capitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Solar ...

. Presently, the position of the Sagittarius Stream relative to the observed layers make the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy the strongest candidate for this intruding object.

References

External links

Deriving The Shape Of The Galactic Stellar Disc
(SkyNightly) March 17, 2006
Deriving the shape of the Galactic stellar disc
A&A press release, March 16, 2006 Milky Way Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy Milky Way Subgroup Stellar streams ? {{Spiral-galaxy-stub

See also

References

External links