A Bar at the Heart of the Milky Way
银河中心的棒状结构
英文原文来自Scientific American 网站 http://www.sciam.com
作者Kate Wong
翻译：Argo Navis@Bootes
发现翻译错误并指正者酌情奖励星币 :wink:
The Milky Way may be our own galactic neighborhood, but it still has some surprises in store. To wit: the most comprehensive structural analysis of the galaxy ever conducted indicates that ours is not a run-of-the-mill spiral one after all.
银河是我们自家的宇宙伙伴，可是它手里还藏着不少让我们惊奇的东西。也就是说，迄今所进行过的最大规模的银河结构分析显示，我们的星系其实并非一个风车磨坊般转动的螺旋。
Using NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope to sample light from some 30 million stars in the Milky Way, astronomers observed a long bar of relatively old stars spanning the center of the galaxy. Stellar bars are known to exist in some other spirals, and researchers have long pondered the possibility that one might reside in ours. They were unsure, however, of whether the heart of the galaxy would contain a bar structure, an ellipse or both.
通过使用NASA的Spitzer空间红外望远镜获取银河系中约3千万个恒星的样本，天文学家观测到了一个横跨银河中心的大型棒状结构。这一结构是由较老的恒星组成的。已经知道，恒星“棒”存在于一些别的旋涡星系中，而研究者长期以来就在考虑我们的星系中存在这种结构的可能性。不过，他们无法确定，银河系的中心是包含了一个棒状结构，还是一个椭圆，还是两个都有。
The new observations paint the clearest picture yet of the Milky Way's interior and reveal the apparent bar in unprecedented detail. The feature is some 27,000 light-years long (7,000 light-years longer than expected) and sits at a 45-degree angle to the galaxy's main plane.
新观测为我们勾画了迄今最清晰的新河系内部图像，并且在前所未有的细节上展现了棒状外观。这一棒状结构长约27千光年（比预计的长7千光年），与银河平面相交成45度角。
"To date, this is the best evidence for a long bar in our galaxy," says Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. Benjamin and his colleagues describe the work in a paper slated for an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“到目前为止，这是我们的银河系中存在巨大棒状结构的最佳证据，”威斯康辛大学的Robert Benjamin说。Benjamin和他的同事在即将发表于新一期天体物理杂志（？？）的论文中介绍了他们的研究。 |
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