“The oscillation period of the wave-like structure is 100 million years,” said Goodman, emphasizing the substantial technology needed to detect movement from such a distance away.

No one yet knows what caused the Radcliffe Wave or why it moves the way it does. “Now we can go and test all these different theories for why the wave formed in the first place," Zucker said.

The Radcliffe Wave is waving Astronomers report oscillation of our giant, gaseous neighbor Peer-Reviewed Publication Harvard University ...

The Radcliffe Wave next to our sun (yellow dot), inside a cartoon model of the Milky Way. Blue dots are clusters of baby stars. The white line is a theoretical model by Ralf Konietzka and ...

A visualisation of the Radcliffe wave, a series of dust and gas clouds (marked here in red) across the Milky Way. It is about 400 light years from our sun, marked in yellow Alyssa A. Goodman ...

Revelations are helping to explain the "Radcliffe Wave," a chain of star-forming clouds that the largest coherent structure ever seen in our galaxy — 9,000 light-years from end to end.

A visualisation of the Radcliffe wave, a series of dust and gas clouds (marked here in red) across the Milky Way. It is about 400 light years from our sun, marked in yellow Alyssa A. Goodman ...

Comparing that data to estimates about our Solar System's trajectory, the Vienna researchers found that the Sun and the Radcliffe wave were near each other between 12 and 15 million years ago ...

This sparkling chain of gas clouds and newborn star clusters is called the Radcliffe Wave, because when astronomers mapped it in 2020, it traced an undulating shape, like the graph of a sine wave ...

“The oscillation period of the wave-like structure is 100 million years,” said Goodman, emphasizing the substantial technology needed to detect movement from such a distance away. The researchers ...

Feb. 20, 2024 Updated Tue., Feb. 20, 2024 at 1:04 p.m. An illustration shows the Radcliffe Wave and its oscillatory pattern as it moves through the galaxy.

The Radcliffe Wave appears to be the backbone, or “gas reservoir,” as a 2022 paper put it, of the spiral arm of our galaxy closest to our sun, known as the Orion Arm, or Local Arm. Additional ...