If you look at the Milky Way from “above,” it almost looks like a cat’s eye: a circle of spiral arms with an oval “iris” in the middle. That iris — a starry bar that connects the spiral arms — has two strange bulges: one peanut-shaped and one disc-shaped, neither conforming to the otherwise pleasingly geometric galaxy. These same deformations appear in some other galaxies. Now, researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) have applied supercomputing to investigate why and how these bulges form in galaxies.
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