Jun 01, 2010 But who discovered the Milky Way? There’s no way to know who actually first noticed the Milky Way. You can see it with your unaided eyes, so our paleolithic ancestors would have seen the Milky. Forgot Password? ©COPYRIGHT 2020 THE MILKY WAY THE MILKY WAY.
The colored region is the previously known galactic disk. The new research has extended its limits much farther away: there is a probability 99.7% or 95.4% respectively that there are disk stars in the regions outside the dashed/dotted circles. Yellow dot is the position of the sun. Background Milky Way image from 'A Roadmap to the Milky Way.' Hurt / SSC-Caltech, NASA/JPL-CaltechFor many years, astronomers believed the Milky Way's disk spanned. Then in 2015, researchers showed that was closer to the mark. To arrive at the new number, researchers at the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics and the National Astronomical Observatories of Beijing turned to a pair of star atlases and in the outermost parts of the galactic plane — the plane that extends through the center of the disk.
The researchers used a statistical analysis to determine that the far-flung stars are chemically similar to the stars in the galactic disk and thus should be considered part of it.' We were able to confirm that some stars of the outermost regions in the plane belong to the disk,' Martin Lopez-Corredoira, a researcher at the institute and the first author of the article describing the research, told NBC News MACH in an email. The research also gives a new sense of the sun's position within the Milky Way. Previously, it was thought that the sun orbits the center of our galaxy at about half the galactic radius. But now we know that some stars are more than three times that distance from the galaxy's center possibly more than four times that distance — so while the sun hasn't made any surprising moves, it's much closer to the center of the galaxy than we thought.One thing that hasn't changed is the number of stars in the Milky Way. 'Although we have increased the size of the galactic stellar disk, the number of stars and the total mass of the galaxy are not significantly affected because the outermost disk.has a very low density of stars,' Lopez-Corredoira said in the email.
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