The largest ever seen gaseous structure in our galaxy

A team of astronomers from the Vienna and Harvard Universities have discovered a wave-shaped gaseous structure. In honour of the collaboration's home base, the structure was named the Radcliffe Wave. This structure is the largest ever seen in our galaxy and is made up of interconnected stellar nurseries. The accurate data from Gaia played an essential role in this discovery: through mapping the interstellar matter in the Milky Way the team noticed this unexpected pattern in the spiral arm close to Earth.

The structure appears to be undulating and can be well described by a damped sinusoidal wave on the plane of the Milky Way, with an average period of about 2 kpc and a maximum amplitude of about 160 pc. The found structure is long and thin, extending to about 9000 light-years but only 400 light-years wide with a height of about 500 light-years above and below the mid-plane of the Galaxy's disk. In the below video the location and shape of the structure can be seen in more detail.