Despite being a flat disk, it has also been discovered that the milky way contains several concentric ripples. This came into revelation after the sifting through huge amounts of data collected in 2002 by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. An international team of researchers led by Heidi Jo Newberg concluded that what was previously thought to be a ring of stars different from the milky way was actually part of the Milky Way’s galactic disk.
According to Dr. Heidi Newberg, the relationship of these two would be a result of the fact that the patterns in them seem to be following a certain spiral structure along the milky way. He also adds that another ring known as TriAnd Ring could also be part of the Milky way which further increases in size.
However, all these rings could only be detected from the visible and clearer part of the milky way and as such it can be taken as an assumption that there could be more ripples within the milky way.
Never the less, the rings are considered to be important part of the galaxy. This is because their previously known width of 100,000 light-years has been extended to 150,000 light-years.
To support the conclusion of the team sifting through the previous data Yan Xu, a Chinese scientist explained that “a number of stars in Milky Way had suddenly dropped at about 50,000 light-years from its center”. However, still there was 60,000 light-years from the galaxy’s core.
The whole research had started from the sun from where Prof. Newberg, Mr. Xu and their team ought to look out for the so-called ripples within the disk. It is at this point that they got to see the mid-plane of the galactic disk which was more into a corrugated design.
This study was started by the researchers to make them learn and understand the mystery about the over-dense and concentric clusters of stars. It is a research that is under the funding of the U.S. government through its National Science Foundation