University of Calgary students make cosmic discovery

Two Faculty of Science students from the University of Calgary played a starring role in finding an unknown structure in the Milky Way galaxy. Russell Shanahan and Stephen Lemmer uncovered the "fingerprint" of a magnetic field while working with data from an international survey of interstellar gas in the Milky Way, called the THOR project. The discovery is important because galaxies have their own magnetic fields, which play a critical, but not well-understood, role in forming stars from clouds