According to new images from the European Space Agency’s recently shuttered Gaia telescope, objects in our Milky Way galaxy are getting shoved out of the way by a gigantic wave of… something.
This newly detected wave is a gigantic motion pattern surging through nearly half of the Milky Way. If our galaxy were the ocean as we stared at it horizontally from a sandy beach, and then all of a sudden a gigantic man cannonball into it, you would see all the boats, buoys, and swimmers bobbing up and down.
That bobbing of all the celestial bodies is what scientists detected. The origins of the cosmic version of this gigantic cannonball man are a mystery.
This Enormous Galactic Wave Is Straight-Up Moving Stars Around
Scientists aren’t entirely sure why this gigantic wave is barreling through the solar system, but there are a couple of theories. One theory suggests that it could somehow be connected to something called a Radcliffe Wave.
Live Science describes it as a nearby ribbon of gas hanging around 500 light-years from Earth. That theory doesn’t hold much water at the moment.
A slightly more likely theory suggests that long ago, a dwarf galaxy either grazed us or got swallowed up by the Milky Way. The resulting gravitational mess could’ve created the enormous ripple we’re seeing now, a kind of slow-motion echo of a significant cosmic event.
Again, those are just theories. No one really knows anything yet. It’s still early on.
Researchers spotted the pattern by studying over 20,000 young stars, and the results were, to put it in scientific terms, bananas. These stars show consistent vertical and radial movement, forming a wave that spans between 30,000 and 65,000 light-years across.
Our galaxy is, quite literally, doing The Wave like a crowd at a particularly boring baseball game.
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