A New Zealand news site is reporting that scientists are now saying that our Milky Way galaxy is 50% more massive than previously thought.
Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it’s 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it’s denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society’s convention in Long Beach, California.
For years, the Andromeda Galaxy (shown at right) was thought to be the Milky Way’s bigger sister. But with this new data, astrophysicists believe the Milky Way to be the larger.
Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who authored this study, also says the Milky Way is spinning faster than they originally thought – 568,000 miles per hour around the center.
The increased estimation of the galaxy’s mass can largely be attributed to dark matter. Not until recently has astrophysics been affected by the presence of dark matter, which is the heaviest stuff in the universe.
These new numbers, particularly the mass of the universe, is causing astronomers and astrophysicists to rethink some of their calculations and theories. It’s been known that our Milky Way galaxy is on a collision course with our neighboring Andromeda galaxy, but with a larger mass to calculate, that collision will happen sooner than previously thought.
Don’t worry, though; it’s still 2 or 3 billion years away.
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