Milky Way Galaxy May Be 50 Percent Bigger Than We Thought

March 12th, 2015

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Rings of stars thought to surround the Milky Way are actually
part of it, according to new research, meaning the galaxy is bigger
than previously believed.
The findings extend the known width of the Milky Way
from 100,000 light-years across to 150,000 light-years, said Yan Xu, a
scientist at the National Astronomical Observatories of China and former
visiting scientist at Rensselaer who was the lead author of a paper
detailing the discovery in Astrophysical Journal.

“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,” Xu said. “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.”
An international
team led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Heidi Jo
Newberg, came to this conclusion after revisiting astronomical data from
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and finding that the galactic disk of the Milky Way is actually contoured into several concentric ripples.
“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,” said Newberg, a
co-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.”
But in this case, the pebble could be a dwarf
galaxy passing 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,” she explained. “As
it radiates outward from the sun, we see at least four ripples in the
disk of the Milky Way.”
She added that although the data only looks at part of the galaxy, it can be assumed that the pattern continues throughout.
The
new research builds upon a 2002 paper in which Newberg established the
existence of the “Monoceros Ring,” an “over-density” of stars at the
outer edges of the galaxy that bulges above the galactic plane.
At
the time, Newberg noticed evidence of another over-density of stars,
between the Monoceros Ring and the sun, but was unable to investigate
further. With more data available from the Sloan survey, researchers
recently took another crack at it.
“I wanted to figure out what
that other over-density was,” Newberg said. “These stars had previously
been considered disk stars, but the stars don’t match the density
distribution you would expect for disk stars, so I thought, ‘Well, maybe
this could be another ring, or a highly disrupted dwarf galaxy.'”
Newberg said the findings support recent research, including a theoretical finding that a dwarf galaxy or dark matter
lump passing through the Milky Way would produce a similar rippling
effect. In fact, the ripples might ultimately be used to measure the
lumpiness of dark matter in our galaxy.