Milky Way: Bigger Than We Ever Thought
Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth’s cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. Not anymore.
The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought, Andromeda’s equal.
Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it’s 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it’s denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society’s convention in Long Beach, Calif.
That difference means a lot, said study author Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. The slight 5-foot-5, 140-pound astrophysicist said it’s the cosmic equivalent of him suddenly bulking up to the size of a 6-foot-3, 210-pound NFL linebacker.
