Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth’s cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda.
Not anymore.
The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought — Andromeda’s equal.
Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, 3D way and found that it is 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it is denser, with 50 percent more mass. The new findings were presented on Monday at the American Astronomical Society’s convention in Long Beach, California.
That difference means a lot, said study author Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“Previously we thought Andromeda was dominant and that we were the little sister of Andromeda,” Reid said. “But now it’s more like we’re fraternal twins.”
That’s not necessarily good news. A bigger Milky Way means that it could be crashing violently into the neighboring Andromeda galaxy sooner than predicted — though still billions of years from now.
Reid and his colleagues used a large system of 10 radio telescope antennas to measure the brightest newborn stars in the galaxy at different times in Earth’s orbit around the sun.
They made a map of those stars, not just in the locations where they were first seen, but an additional dimension of time — something Reid said had not been done before.
With that, Reid was able to determine the speed at which the spiral-shaped Milky Way is spinning around its center.
That speed — about 914,0000kph — is faster than the 791,800kph that scientists had been using for decades. That is about a 15 percent jump in spiral speed.
The old number was based on less accurate measurements and this is based on actual observations, Reid said.
Once the speed of the galaxy’s spin was determined, complex formulas that end up cubing the speed determined the mass of all the dark matter in the Milky Way. And the dark matter — the stuff we cannot see — is by far the heaviest stuff in the universe.
So that means the Milky Way is about one-and-a-half times the mass that astronomers previously calculated.
The paper makes sense, but is not the final word on the size of the Milky Way, said Mark Morris, an astrophysicist at the University of California Los Angeles, who was not part of the study.
FRAUD ALLEGED: The leader of an opposition alliance made allegations of electoral irregularities and called for a protest in Tirana as European leaders are to meet Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama’s Socialist Party scored a large victory in parliamentary elections, securing him his fourth term, official results showed late on Tuesday. The Socialist Party won 52.1 percent of the vote on Sunday compared with 34.2 percent for an alliance of opposition parties led by his main rival Sali Berisha, according to results released by the Albanian Central Election Commission. Diaspora votes have yet to be counted, but according to initial results, Rama was also leading there. According to projections, the Socialist Party could have more lawmakers than in 2021 elections. At the time, it won 74 seats in the
A Croatian town has come up with a novel solution to solve the issue of working parents when there are no public childcare spaces available: pay grandparents to do it. Samobor, near the capital, Zagreb, has become the first in the country to run a “Grandmother-Grandfather Service,” which pays 360 euros (US$400) a month per child. The scheme allows grandparents to top up their pension, but the authorities also hope it will boost family ties and tackle social isolation as the population ages. “The benefits are multiple,” Samobor Mayor Petra Skrobot told reporters. “Pensions are rather low and for parents it is sometimes
CANCER: Jose Mujica earned the moniker ‘world’s poorest president’ for giving away much of his salary and living a simple life on his farm, with his wife and dog Tributes poured in on Tuesday from across Latin America following the death of former Uruguayan president Jose “Pepe” Mujica, an ex-guerrilla fighter revered by the left for his humility and progressive politics. He was 89. Mujica, who spent a dozen years behind bars for revolutionary activity, lost his battle against cancer after announcing in January that the disease had spread and he would stop treatment. “With deep sorrow, we announce the passing of our comrade Pepe Mujica. President, activist, guide and leader. We will miss you greatly, old friend,” Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi wrote on X. “Pepe, eternal,” a cyclist shouted out minutes later,
MIGRATION: The Supreme Court justices said they were not deciding whether Trump could legally use the Alien Enemies Act to deport undocumented migrants US President Donald Trump on Friday lashed out at the US Supreme Court after it blocked his bid to resume deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members, saying the justices are “not allowing me to do what I was elected to do.” Trump’s berating of the high court, in a post on Truth Social, came after it dealt another setback to his attempt to swiftly expel alleged Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members using an obscure wartime law, the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA). Trump has been at loggerheads with the judiciary ever since he returned to the White House, venting
RSS