Stellar desert discovered in the Milky Way

[UM-Bot]

A vast expanse of space totally devoid of new stars has been found at the heart of our own galaxy.

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/297410/stellar-desert-discovered-in-the-milky-way

[paperdyer]

Cosmic entropy? Maybe aliens cloaking their home solar system so we won't visit.  Galacticus?  I hope it can't start heading this way.

[Sundew]

I guess this should not be too surprising, the universe or even our galaxy is not homogenous in nature with evenly spaced stars. If there are denser regions (and that's obvious) it should be no surprise there are voids as well. 

[Harte]

The mapping is the most interesting thing about this. The Cepheid-less space the article is reports on is not just a random region. It's like a highly symmetric disk with the galactic center at the center.

However, the source article says:

there’s a huge “Cepheid desert” extending for a whopping 8000 light-years from the centre. To put that into perspective, the Milky Way itself measures 100,000 light-years across.

That’s a whole lotta space with virtually nothing within it. Kinda spooky when you think about it.

I don't see how they can tell this if they are only detecting Cepheids. I think this may be a journalistic error.

Harte

 

[Ell]

We must conclude that stars in that region age rather quickly. We can then predict that the further from the center of that region, the less quickly stars age and the higher the relative number of Cepheis will be.

[Harte]

1 hour ago, Ell said:

We must conclude that stars in that region age rather quickly. We can then predict that the further from the center of that region, the less quickly stars age and the higher the relative number of Cepheis will be.

This prediction falls apart rather quickly when one looks at the distribution of Cepheids in the Milky Way - the mapping I referred to previously.

Harte