Revelations are helping to explain the "Radcliffe Wave," a chain of star-forming clouds that the largest coherent structure ever seen in our galaxy — 9,000 light-years from end to end.

The Radcliffe Wave was named in honor of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in 2020, when its undulation was discovered by a fellow affiliated with the institute at the time.

Scientists studied the Radcliffe Wave, a giant star-studded structure not far from our sun, to see that it is indeed "waving." ...

The Radcliffe Wave next to our sun (yellow dot), inside a cartoon model of the Milky Way. Blue dots are clusters of baby stars. The white line is a theoretical model by Ralf Konietzka and ...

The stars’ motion revealed that the whole Radcliffe Wave was oscillating up and down. Konietzka and his colleagues compare the stars’ motion to fans doing “the wave” in a packed stadium.

The Radcliffe Wave continues to wrap around constellations like Taurus and Perseus, peaking around Cepheus, and wrapping around again.

Even though the Radcliffe Wave resides in our galactic backyard, at just 400 light-years away, astronomers just noticed it in 2020 thanks to the Gaia telescope's ability to pinpoint the distances ...

An international team of researchers, led by the University of Vienna, has revealed that the Solar System passed through the complex Orion star-forming region, a structure linked to the so-called ...

Our sun and its planets crossed the Radcliffe Wave in the well-known Orion complex.

A giant wave of undulating gas and dust appears, per new research, to have engulfed our Solar System millions of years ago. As New Scientist reports, astrophysicists have discovered that the Radcliffe ...

Astronomers are still discovering strange things in space, and the latest is something they’ve named the Radcliffe Wave. This wave-shaped chain of star-forming clouds is the largest coherent ...