CALGARY -- Two Faculty of Science students from the University of Calgary played a starring role in finding an unknown structure in the Milky Way galaxy.
Russell Shanahan and Stephen Lemmer uncovered the "fingerprint" of a magnetic field while working with data from an international survey of interstellar gas in the Milky Way, called the THOR project.
The discovery is important because galaxies have their own magnetic fields, which play a critical, but not well-understood, role in forming stars from clouds of molecular gas and dust.
It was possible due to recent upgrades in the radio telescopes allowing the students to see the extreme effect of the magnetic structure 18,000 light-years from Earth.
The students were working in U of C associate professor Dr. Jeroen Stil’s radio astronomy research group in the department of physics and astronomy.
"We discovered that there is this strong magnetic effect on the very onset of gas when it enters the spiral arm, even before star formation turns on," said Stil, who leads the magnetism science component of THOR.
Shanahan and Lemmer are the first and second authors of the international team’s paper "Strong Excess Faraday Rotation on the Inside of the Sagittarius Spiral Arm" published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
