CALGARY (660 NEWS) — The University of Calgary is getting some international recognition after discovering a giant magnetic field structure in a spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Russell Shanahan and Stephen Lemmer uncovered the previously unknown fingerprint while they worked with data from the international THOR project, a survey of interstellar gas in the Milky Way.

Shanahan is currently a PhD student at the university, while Lemmer was an honours astrophysics undergraduate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

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It is believed this is the first time this pattern has ever been seen.

The discovery plays an important but not well-understood role in forming stars from clouds of molecular gas and dust.

The area of which the magnetic field was discovered was about 18,000 light-years from Earth.