Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has recently published a study showing that the Milky Way is much smaller than had been thought. This news caught everyone by surprise scientists who relied on old data for studies of the universe.
Millions of years after its existence, astronomers say that the Milky Way is much smaller than previously thought, according to a study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society '. This is the first time that scientists can accurately measure the mass of the galaxy that contains our solar system.
The discovery has revolutionized all the information that is known so far of the galaxy. Specifically, the team of experts involved in this work as been discovered that the Milky Way is known about half the weight of a neighboring galaxy called Andromeda, which has a structure similar to ours. The Milky Way and Andromeda are the two largest galaxies in a region astronomers call the Local Group.
The results indicate that the Andromeda galaxy are twice as popular dark matter Milky Way. In fact, researchers say the extra weight Andromeda has to be partly due to dark matter, a poorly understood invisible substance that makes up most of the outer regions of galaxies.
Research Sources say their job is to help you learn more about how the outer regions of galaxies, and provide further evidence to support a theory that suggests that the universe is expanding is structured. Although both galaxies appear to be of similar dimensions, until now scientists had been unable to prove which one is bigger.
All the studies that had been done so far only managed to measure the mass enclosed within the inner regions of the galaxies. In this new study, researchers were able to calculate the mass of the invisible stuff that is in the outer regions of both galaxies and reveal their total weight, noting that 90 percent of the area of both galaxies is invisible.
This study is supported by other studies published previously. The team of scientists from the research led by the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, used recently published data on known distances between galaxies and their velocities to calculate the total mass of the Milky Way and Andromeda.
Jorge Peñarrubia, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh who led the study, said: "We always suspected that Andromeda is more massive than the Milky Way, but the simultaneous weighting of both galaxies was extremely difficult Our recent study combined. measures the relative movement between our galaxy and Andromeda with the largest catalog of nearby galaxies ever compiled to make it possible. "
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