Radcliffe Wave

The Radcliffe Wave is a galactic structure (9,000 light years long) that defines the shape of the Milky Way. Its discovery at Radcliffe dramatically changed scientists’ understanding of the galaxy that we call home, and it remains one of the Institute’s most defining collaborations.

The Radcliffe Moment

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The Radcliffe Wave is a massive galactic structure (9,000 light years long) that defines the shape of the Milky Way. Its discovery in 2019 dramatically changed scientists’ understanding of the galaxy we call home, and the story of this discovery is one of the finest examples of how the interdisciplinary approach of Harvard Radcliffe Institute can foster groundbreaking advances.

In 2017, João Alves, an astronomer in Vienna, applied for a Radcliffe fellowship to collaborate with Alyssa Goodman and other astronomers at Harvard, including the then–Harvard graduate student Catherine Zucker. He could not have anticipated the impact of Radcliffe’s environment on their work. In the same building as his office was an exhibition by the artist Anna Von Mertens, whose hand-stitched quilts depicting star trails reimagined the work of the astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (1868–1921). Alves was intrigued. While studying new data from the Gaia spacecraft with Goodman and Zucker, Alves met Von Mertens. “We started talking more and more, looking together at the scientific astronomical images I was working with,” he recalls. “What blew my mind was how differently she looked at the images. … I realized that if I started thinking like a visual artist, I could see much more in my own work.” This led Alves, Goodman, and Zucker to look at the data afresh, and a new pattern emerged: a wave. They named their finding the Radcliffe Wave to “honor … both the early-20th-century female astronomers from Radcliffe College and the interdisciplinary spirit of the current Radcliffe Institute, which contributed to this discovery.”

In 2024, the team announced another discovery—the Radcliffe Wave not only looks like a wave but undulates like one. This exciting work continues. In fact, Alves expects study of the structure to be a careerlong pursuit: “There’s a lot to unpack still.”

Video

The Story behind the Radcliffe Wave

In January 2020, Radcliffe- and Harvard-affiliated astronomers announced a startling discovery: a massive star-making gaseous structure in our own Milky Way galaxy. In this video, these scientists explain that discovery—and why they named it the Radcliffe Wave.

AN ASTRONOMER + AN ASTRONOMER + A VISUAL ARTIST

The People

Alyssa A. Goodman

Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy, Harvard University
Research associate, Smithsonian Institution
Former faculty codirector for science, Radcliffe Institute
2016–2017 Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow, Radcliffe Institute

João Alves

Professor of stellar astrophysics, University of Vienna
2018–2019 Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow, Radcliffe Institute

Anna Von Mertens

2018–2019 exhibiting artist, Radcliffe Institute

Detail from Anna Von Mertens’s The stars fading from view on the morning of Henrietta Leavitt’s birth, July 4, 1868, Lancaster, Massachusetts. (2018, hand-stitched cotton, 54x100 in.) In the 2018–2019 exhibition Measure, commissioned by Radcliffe, Von Mertens explored the life of Henrietta Leavitt (1868–1921), one of the women “computers” hired a century ago to study glass-plate astronomical photographs at the Harvard College Observatory. Leavitt searched for patterns among these glassy stars; her findings provided a unit of measurement for galactic distances and led to our current understanding of the shape of the cosmos. Von Mertens’s meticulous stitches reimagine Leavitt’s painstaking work. Photo by Kevin Grady/Radcliffe Institute

The clouds that make up the Radcliffe Wave (highlighted in red) pass within just 500 light years of our sun (in yellow). In this image, wave data is superimposed on an artist’s illustration of the Milky Way as it appears in a screen shot taken from WorldWide Telescope. Courtesy of Alyssa A. Goodman/Harvard University

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