CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) " It turns out our Milky Way galaxy is truly warped, at least around the far edges.

Scientists in China and Australia released an updated 3D map of the Milky Way on Tuesday. They used 1,339 pulsating stars " young, newly catalogued stars bigger and brighter than our sun " to map the galaxy's shape.



Lead researcher Xiaodian Chen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing said it's difficult to determine distances from the sun to the Milky Way's fringes, "without having a clear idea of what that disc actually looks like." The stars on which his team's map is based " known as classical Cepheids " provided substantial measuring accuracy.


The study appears in the journal Nature Astronomy.

