Read what say Astronomers about “mysterious galactic” !!?

Stretching across the night sky, a recently found chain of star-forming clouds is undulating through the galaxy

n illustration shows the Radcliffe Wave and its oscillatory pattern as it moves through the galaxy. The light blue curve shows the overall shape of the traveling wave, while the magenta and green lines show the wave’s minimum and maximum excursions above and below the galactic plane. ( Harvard Astronomy Department)
Astronomers are still discovering strange things in space, and the latest is something they’ve named the Radcliffe Wave. This wave-shaped chain of star-forming clouds is the largest coherent structure ever seen in our galaxy — 9,000 light-years from end to end, stretching across the night sky from Canis Major to Cygnus, with Orion in between.

Now it turns out the Radcliffe Wave is actually waving. So claims a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature.

The star-forming clouds are rising far above the plane of the galaxy and then back down again. This kind of oscillation is known as a traveling wave, which is akin to sports fans “doing the wave” by popping up from their seats in a synchronized round-the-stadium pattern.

“This issue of the wave — you can find papers that hint at it in the past — but it’s nailed down now. This is a brick in the wall and it’s not coming out,” said Bob Benjamin, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater who was not part of this new research. “This newest paper is a really neat step in understanding the origin of this structure.”
This structure is within our galaxy and virtually right next door. It’s within spitting distance — if you could spit 500 light-years.

The story has another twist: It appears that our solar system passed through the Radcliffe Wave about 13 million years ago. And that might have been an interesting time for life on Earth. These star-forming regions have more than their fair share of exploding stars.

“Thirteen million years ago, we think we could have passed through a festival of supernovae going off,” said study co-author Catherine Zucker, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Motion in the Milky Way
Until just a few years ago, no one recognized that the many star-forming clouds relatively near the sun were part of a coherent structure. That’s because astronomers can see distant galaxies better than the one that surrounds us, the Milky Way. There is no telescope out there in intergalactic space, a couple million light-years away, obtaining beautiful images of the entirety of our galaxy. (If there is, it’s not one of ours.)