MEXICO: It has been revealed that a ring-like filament of stars that is wrapping around the Milky Way may actually belong to the galaxy. If it is like that, the galaxy is far more bigger than we earlier thought. It would increase size of the Milky Way up to 50 percent.
“In essence, what we found is that the disk of the Milky Way isn’t just a disk of stars in a flat plane–it’s corrugated. As it radiates outward from the sun, we see at least four ripples in the disk of the Milky Way. While we can only look at part of the galaxy with this data, we assume that this pattern is going to be found throughout the disk,” said Heidi Newberg with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in a statement.
“Going into the research, astronomers had observed that the number of Milky Way stars diminishes rapidly about 50,000 light years from the center of the galaxy, and then a ring of stars appears at about 60,000 light years from the center. What we see now is that this apparent ring is actually a ripple in the disk. And it may well be that there are more ripples further out which we have not yet seen,” said Yan Xu, a scientist at the National Astronomical Observatories of China and leading author of the paper.
“It’s very similar to what would happen if you throw a pebble into still water – the waves will radiate out from the point of impact. If a dwarf galaxy goes through the disk, it would gravitationally pull the disk up as it comes in, and pull the disk down as it goes through, and this will set up a wave pattern that propagates outward. If you view this in the context of other research that’s emerged in the past two to three years, you start to see a picture is forming,“ said Newberg.
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