Measured distance within the Milky Way gives clues to what our galaxy looks like

For the first time, astronomers have directly measured the distance to a spot clear across the galaxy. The established but challenging technique promises a new way to map the structure of the Milky Way.

This method, called parallax, has measured distances to stars since the 1830s. But because of galactic dust in the way, it has been difficult to use parallax on stars on the opposite side of the galaxy. Other ways to measure distance are saddled with assumptions and uncertainties.

Researchers used the Very Long Baseline Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico to peer through the galactic dust and track a star-forming region in the outer Scutum-Centaurus spiral arm, which is on the opposite side of the Milky Way from the sun. Alberto Sanna of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and colleagues report in the Oct. 13 Science that the region is over 66,500 light-years away.

The team observed the distant spot for a year, drew an imaginary triangle between it and two points in Earth’s orbit, and then used trigonometry to measure the distance. Applying the same technique to other regions of the Milky Way will help astronomers figure out what our galaxy looks like from the outside and compare it with other spiral galaxies.