The Milky Way disc may be 50% larger than previously thought.

Star ripples, as if filaments encircling the Milky Way above and below the plane of the galaxy, may actually be part of it. If this is the case, then the size of the Milky Way may be 50% more known to us earlier. In addition, there are intriguing questions about what exactly caused this “wave” of stars, reports DiscoveryNews.

The researchers used data collected during a reanalysis of the brightness and distance of stars on the galactic edge by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) , a large-scale study of images and spectra of stars and galaxies using a 2.5-meter wide-angle telescope at the Apache Point Observatory, New Mexico. They found that the edge of the disk of the galaxy supposedly wrinkled and represents a series of "crests", similar to corrugated cardboard.

“It seems to me that these“ patterns ”are similar to the spiral structure of the Milky Way, and they can be related,” says astronomer Heidi Newberg of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, USA.
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She and her colleagues suspect that a dwarf galaxy may have passed through the disk of the milky way, initiating the formation of ripples, like a pebble thrown into the water, begins to spread circles in the water.



Evidence that the so-called "Ring of the Unicorn" , located at a distance of more than 65,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way (the galaxy disk, according to the latest calculations, measures 100x3x1 thousand light years), is in fact part of it, came as a surprise to Heidi Newberg which was a member of the team that opened it in 2002.

“We thought it was„ construction waste “, brought along by a dwarf galaxy, which formed a large ring (Ring of the Unicorn). For 15 years, this question was a stumbling block among astronomers: the first half believed that it was just a “tidal wave” that came with a dwarf, and the second half, that the ring is some part of the galaxy disk, ”says Newberg.

Galaxies are in constant motion and interact in every way with each other as they approach each other, are absorbed by each other, collide. Human life is too short to observe these processes from the beginning to the end in one example, we can only fix the individual stages of these processes in the universe. That is why scientists and the question arose whether the Ring of the Unicorn is part of our galaxy, or is it a foreign object.

So why do astronomers believe that the original diameter of the Milky Way is 100,000 light years - an incorrect figure? The essence of the problem lies in the fact that we are seeing the Milky Way from the inside of its disk, and not from the side.


Representation of the Milky Way from the ground, from inside the disk


Image of the Milky Way from the side / NASA

Previously it was thought that the structure of our galaxy was more or less homogeneous, from which calculations of its size followed. However, the new data suggests that our galaxy due to the wave-like nature of its disk has “gaps” in its structure, i.e. between the rows of stars formed by the putative gravitational influence when a dwarf passes through the Milky Way, there are spaces of emptiness, previously hidden from the gaze of humanity. Up to this point, the researchers could not take into account the presence of such “breaks” in the structure of our galaxy, from which incorrect calculations were made.

Work on this issue continues. Astronomers are eager to get pictures of the Milky Way in higher resolution, as well as a three-dimensional image of the Ring of the Unicorn. The scientific work of the team has already been published in the Astrophysical Journal, you can read it here .