A few years ago, astronomers uncovered an enormous secret: A wave-shaped chain of gaseous clouds in our sun’s backyard, giving birth to clusters of stars along the spiral arm of the Milky Way.

Having named this new structure the “Radcliffe Wave” in honor of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where the undulation was discovered, the team now reports in Nature that the Radcliffe Wave not only looks like a wave, but also moves like one — oscillating through space-time much like “the wave” moving through a stadium full of fans.

Ralf Konietzka, the paper’s lead author and a Ph.D. student at Harvard’s Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, explains: “By using the motion of baby stars born in the gaseous clouds along the Radcliffe Wave, we can trace the motion of their natal gas to show that the Radcliffe Wave is actually waving.”

SAO Scientist Catherine Zucker (from left), Astronomy professorAlyssa Goodman, and Astronomy grad student Ralf Konietzka.

YouTube video here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY5xLRr5npE

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/02/radcliffe-wave-is-waving/

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