WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The Milky Way is warped -- like a bowl,
a saddle or the brim of a fedora hat, depending on when you look
-- and a pair of interloping galaxies may be to blame,
astronomers said on Monday. Earth is in a fairly non-warped
neighborhood, because it lies relatively close to the center of
the Milky Way's disk, said Leo Blitz of the University of
California, Berkeley. But the far-flung reaches of the galaxy
could be caught up in a warp of as much as 20,000 light-years. A
light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels
in a year and a standard astronomical measurement. To figure out
what causes the warp, Blitz and his colleagues analyzed hydrogen
gas emissions in the warp area, and found that not only is the
galactic disk bending, but it is vibrating like a drum-head, in
three distinct ways. One mode is like a bowl, with the galactic
plane bending up all around; another is like a saddle, and the
third is like the brim of a fedora hat, bent up in the back and
down in the front,