The Skeleton of the Milky Way
Catherine Zucker, Cara Battersby, Alyssa Goodman

TL;DR
This paper presents evidence for multiple filamentary structures in the Milky Way that act as 'bones', tracing the Galaxy's spiral arms and structure, expanding on Nessie's role as a galactic skeleton marker.
Contribution
It identifies ten new filamentary 'bones' in the Milky Way, demonstrating their potential to map Galactic structure beyond Nessie.
Findings
Six filaments have aspect ratios ≥50:1
Six align with the Scutum-Centaurus arm in p-p-v space
Filament 5 closely resembles Nessie in the Northern Sky
Abstract
Recently, Goodman et al. (2014) argued that the very long, very thin infrared dark cloud "Nessie" lies directly in the Galactic mid-plane and runs along the Scutum-Centaurus arm in position-position-velocity () space as traced by lower density and higher density gas. Nessie was presented as the first "bone" of the Milky Way, an extraordinarily long, thin, high-contrast filament that can be used to map our Galaxy's "skeleton." Here, we present evidence for additional bones in the Milky Way Galaxy, arguing that Nessie is not a curiosity but one of several filaments that could potentially trace Galactic structure. Our ten bone candidates are all long, filamentary, mid-infrared extinction features which lie parallel to, and no more than 20 pc from, the physical Galactic mid-plane. We use , , , and radial…
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