Posted on 01/07/2009 5:19:26 AM PST by Red Badger
Our galaxy is much bigger than once thought, according to research presented at a major astronomy meeting this week.
The results suggest the Milky Way is roughly the same size as Andromeda, the largest galaxy in our local group.
What is more, it is moving 15% faster than earlier predictions.
The greater mass means that future collisions with nearby galaxies could happen sooner than thought, according to the researchers.
Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, US, and his colleagues made use of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to deduce the Milky Way's size and speed.
Dr Reid was speaking at the 213th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Long Beach, California.
The VLBA is a system of 10 radio telescopes scattered across and around North America that together allow unprecedented resolution in astronomy measurements.
This resolution, according to the CfA, is equivalent to being able to read a newspaper in Cairo from an armchair in Edinburgh. By using the VLBA to measure the apparent shift of far-flung star-forming regions when the Earth is on opposite sides of the Sun, the researchers were able to measure the distance to those regions using fewer assumptions than prior efforts.
"These measurements use the traditional surveyor's method of triangulation and do not depend on any assumptions based on other properties, such as brightness, unlike earlier studies," said team member Karl Menten of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.
The results show that the Milky Way is about 15% wider than previously thought.
Spinning around
Tiny shifts in the frequency of the radio emission that arise because the regions are moving gave the researchers an estimate of how quickly the Milky Way rotates around its centre.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
Does this galaxy make me look fat?
LOL!!!!...........
Thanks. But is an entire galaxy a clump?
Yes. All galaxies are “clumps” of matter, as are black holes, stars, solar systems and planets........
The entire theory (best we have to date) relies on the lumpiness of the very earily universe, unfortunately that lumpiness requires something called inflation. Where for a instant in time the very early universe expanded faster then the speed of light.
Hmmm, faster then light? And this is where things get very interesting.
Since the laws of the universe were created in the Big Bang why could not inflation be possible for an instant before those laws where created?
Hmmm, well much bigger brains then I have are losing sleep over that one! LOL, I like this definition of the Big bang: "First there was nothing and then it exploded". It's the best theory we've got but there are a few "problems".
jim s
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