Posted on 01/10/2006 11:03:37 PM PST by Lorianne
WASHINGTON A previously unrecognized galaxy appears to be merging with the Milky Way, bringing hundreds of thousands of stars into our home galaxy that scientists had not noticed until now, astronomers said.
A survey of the northern sky has detected a huge, but diffuse structure within the confines of the Milky Way that does not seem to fit in with other parts of the galaxy that contains our solar system, scientists said Monday.
Robert Lupton of Princeton University told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society that the large but faint collection of stars rises almost perpendicular to the flat, spiral disk of the Milky Way. The most likely interpretation of the structure, the astronomer said, is that it is a dwarf galaxy that has been merging with our galaxy.
The dwarf galaxy lies in the direction of the constellation Virgo at an estimated distance of 30,000 light-years from Earth, researchers reported.
While some of the stars of the companion galaxy may have been observed with telescopes for centuries, they said, no one realized they belonged to another body because they are so close and commingled with Milky Way stars.
The Milky Way is a flat, pinwheel galaxy measuring more than 100,000 light-years across and containing an estimated 200 billion stars. A light-year is the distance light travels in a vacuum in a year's time, about 9.5 billion kilometers, or 5.9 trillion miles.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
There goes the neighborhood!
Save the planet! We're dooooomed... dooomed, I tell ya!
Ten points for the first person to name the galaxy currently "colliding" with ours.
I mean the other galaxy besides the one in this article...
Ten points for the first person to name all the galaxies!
Aha! I always knew there was an alternate galaxy, an alternate reality...LOL! It's where our "twins" are! Like that old Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode.
I heard rats are already out registering these aliens to vote, claiming they are being disenfranchised.
Bizarro.
Thanks for posting that! Been trying to put it in my collection!
Yes. The DU Galaxy. They're only $10 away!
I hope this is not the dreaded and proverbial Mongolian Cluster...
LOL.
What the heck, ten points per million..
That will screw up your horoscope.
There's two that I've heard of. One in Canis Major and the other one here.
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