The famous magazine "Scientific American" recently published the cover article "new vision of the galaxy" jointly written by the astronomer of Harvard Smithsonian astrophysics center, academician of the American Academy of Sciences, mark Reid, and Professor Zheng Xingwu of the school of astronomy and space science of Nanjing University, summarizing the two of them and Karl of the Max Planck Institute of radio astronomy in Germany The international team led by Professor Menten has been working on the structure of the galaxy for 15 years.
The team used the very long baseline interferometry technology to accurately measure the distance and self motion of nearly 200 massive star forming regions located on the silver disk, obtain the structure of the spiral arm of the galaxy, the position of the solar system and its rotation speed around the center of the galaxy, and draw a new galactic structure map with a scale of 100000 x 10 million light-years. This is the most accurate structural map of the Milky way so far. It clearly shows that the Milky way is a rod spiral galaxy with four spiral arms. It completely solves the major scientific problem of how many spiral arms the Milky way has in astronomy.
Source: CCTV news