A New Technique Lets Us Learn What the Milky Way's Arms Are Made Of - by spacewriter
When you look at charts and images of the sky, the stars stand out. Most maps of the Milky Way take advantage of that property. Concentrations of young stars stand out the most because they’re bright. They form in regions where the rotating spiral arms compress clouds of gas and dust. The result is batches of newborn stars. So, one of the easiest ways to map those arms is to look for new stars.
Wherever you have star birth, you also have their stellar crêches—clouds of gas and dust. And, those clouds often hide the new stars—and the galaxy arms—from our view. This is where chemical cartography comes in handy. It relies on knowing the metal content of stars. The first stars in the Universe are fairly metal-poor. That means they are mostly hydrogen and helium. As they died they scattered heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen, and so on to interstellar space.
Then, he compared it to other maps of the Milky Way. He found that the spiral arms in those charts lined up with the ones in his metallicity charts. Since his map showed the existence of spiral arms based solely on stellar metallicity , new regions showed up. Those were places not mapped by other charts, probably because they aren’t easily visible.
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