14 DAY TRIAL // Using the online Milky Way Project, about 35,000 volunteers were able to discover more than 5,500 cosmic bubbles inside our galaxy, the Milky Way. The tool uses data provided by the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, which surveys the sky in infrared wavelengths.
The people who participated in this endeavor were not necessarily scientists, but merely citizens interested in classifying various types of cosmic structures. However, their work does have some serious implications for our understanding of the galaxy.
It would now appear that the Milky Way is in fact producing more stars than astronomers first suspected. The high number of bubbles that were discovered during this experiment indicate significant stellar formation in numerous corners of the galaxy.
“The Milky Way's disk is like champagne with bubbles all over the place,” European Southern Observatory (ESO) astrophysics PhD student Eli Bressert says, as quoted by Space.