Site map . You would then know just about as much as any astronomer does about the Gould belt. Wednesday, armed with results, Gehrels and his colleagues announced that there is in fact a distinct batch of gamma-ray emitters in the Gould belt, confirming an expectation that goes back more than a decade. The results will appear in the March 23 issue of the journal Nature. White dots represent massive stars in the Gould belt.
Yellow dots are unidentified gamma-ray sources in the belt.
The objects are all less than about 1,000 light-years away. The entire Milky Way galaxy is more than 100,000 light-years across. Grindlay, who was not involved in the study, said the findings will help explain how an area of massive star formation, made up of giant clouds of gas and stars 20 to 30 times the size of our sun, contributes to the overall gamma-ray emission in the galaxy. The hope would be that one could apply these results from right close by to understand what an entire galaxy would look like when it's got whole bursts of these massive stars being formed. Pulsars are small spinning stars that send out radio waves, which sweep through the cosmos like a ballerina's skirt.