In the Milky Way, not far from our sun, lies a colossal chain of gas clouds. It's called the Radcliffe Wave. Some 800 million stars live within the Radcliffe Wave, and the wave's star-forming gas is even now seeding hundreds of millions more.
As you may imagine, the astronomers who discovered the Wave named it as such because it looked like a "wave" to them — and in a new paper, some of the same astronomers now present evidence that it is also a literal wave. It oscillates over time, they realized, its stars rising through the Milky Way's disk before falling back again.
