Our galaxy is a whole lot larger than it looks. New research discovers that Milky Way stretches nearly 2 million light-years across --- more than 15 times wider than its luminous spiral disk. The number could lead to a better estimate of how massive the galaxy is and what number of different universes orbit it.
The research that can be seen on the arXiv repository notes there's a measurement that would provide people the exact dimensions of the galaxy, as well as what number of galaxies surround ours.
Galaxies slow down near the Milky Way's edge, scientists claim
Astronomers have long acknowledged that the brightest part of the Milky Way, the pancake-formed disk of stars that houses the Sun, is a few 120,000 light-years across.
Alis Deason, an astrophysicist at Durham University in England, and her associates used nearby galaxies to locate the Milky Way's edge.
"Using the current dwarf galaxy population, we predict the edge of the Milky Way halo to be 292 +/- 61 [kiloparsecs]," the scientists wrote in the study's abstract. As a result, the researchers agree with the diameter of the Milky Way is 1.9 million light-years, based totally on their findings.
A kiloparsec is 1,000 parsecs or 3,262 light-years. A light-year, which measures distance in space, reaches six trillion miles.
Through their computer simulations, the researchers discovered galaxies had been slowing down near the Milky Way galaxy.
The researchers noted Milky Way's outer boundary is a fundamental constraint in most analyses. However, they argued defining a physically observationally motivated outer edge is preferable.
In particular, the scientists sought instances where two massive galaxies arose side by side, like the Milky Way and Andromeda because of each galaxy's gravity tugs on the other.
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"Here we have linked the boundary of the underlying dark matter distribution to the observable stellar halo and the dwarf galaxy population," they said.
Using current telescope observations, the researchers found a comparable plunge in the speeds of small galaxies near the Milky Way. This occurred at a distance of about 950,000 light-years from the Milky Way's middle, marking the galaxy's edge, the scientists say. The side is 35 times farther from the galactic center than the Sun is.
Scientists claim approximately 60 galaxies are surrounding our own. Still, it's possible others ought to be found, thanks to the research.
New Milky Way measurement should tease out galactic qualities
Rosemary Wyse, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, told ScienceNews the new Milky Way measurement should "help astronomers tease out different galactic qualities." That's a reference to the reality that more should people realize the real dimensions of the Milky Way.
In October 2019, Fox News mentioned the Milky Way had stolen several dwarf galaxies from the neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) galaxy, which include the Carina and Fornax, as part of a merger among the two that is still ongoing.
Earlier this month, NASA launched a new picture of the middle of the Milky Way. In January, astronomers noticed four "strange" objects orbiting Sagittarius A*.
