The amount of warping the researchers saw in the Milky Way was surprisingly pronounced, Skowron said. 'Warping of the galactic disk has been detected before, but this is the first time we can use individual objects to trace its shape in three dimensions,' study co-author Przemek Mróz at the University of Warsaw said in a statement. This warping was potentially caused by the galaxy's interactions with satellite galaxies, intergalactic gas or dark matter. Specifically, the galaxy's disk is not flat at distances greater than 25,000 light-years from the galactic core, but warped. The new map helped reveal more details on distortions that astronomers had previously detected in the shape of the Milky Way. This is the first such map based on directly measured distances to thousands of celestial landmarks across the galaxy. These findings helped the astronomers build a large-scale 3D map of the Milky Way. 'This took six years but it was worth it,' study lead author Dorota Skowron, an astrophysicist at the University of Warsaw in Poland, told. Using the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, which monitors the brightness of nearly 2 billion stars, the scientists charted the distance between the sun and more than 2,400 Cepheids throughout the Milky Way. Skowron/OGLE/Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw) Red points indicate older stars, while younger ones are shown in blue. This image compares a simulation of the Milky Way galaxy's Cepheid star variables (left) with actual observations of their numbers (right).

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