The Earth is in the midst of a monster 20 times the size of the Milky Way

The bright band we still see in the sky and call it “the Milky Way” was once thought to be an entire galaxy containing Earth called the Milky Way.

It’s a spiral galaxy with a disc of light about 100,000 light-years across, which ranks as a “monster” in the galactic world and has achieved this formidable size by swallowing many other galaxies.

However, studies in recent years have gradually shown that the so-called Milky Way is actually much larger in size, with incredibly extended structures beyond the halo of stars known as the “Galaxy” that we know. still see.

The Milky Way is not only our imaginary “galaxy”, which is in the form of a thin disk, glowing with dense stars, but is also surrounded by a halo consisting of two inner and outer layers, which can cause The actual diameter of the entire galaxy is up to 2 million light years – Photo: UCSC/NASA/ESA/STScI.

One of those mysteries is the halo, the halo that surrounds the main disc of light. Research just published by the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC – USA) has shown an additional surprise: There is not only aura.

According to Sci-News, the team used data from the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS) mission, carried out by the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT), and identified 208 stars. The variable is not in the main stellar disk, but in the halo.

Shockingly, they are surprisingly distant, with distances from the center of the Milky Way ranging from 65,000 to 1.05 million light-years.

This suggests that the habitation of stars in the Milky Way must be a disk up to 2 million light-years in diameter, even though only the middle of the disk is much denser than the surrounding part is visible below. in the form of a bright band from Earth, or a disk of light if viewed from a planet in another galaxy.

This data also provides valuable information about the halo, a very faint structure that is almost invisible, making it difficult to observe.

“We can use these variable stars as reliable tracking tools to determine distances. Our observations confirm theoretical estimates of the size of the halo.” – Dr. Yuting Feng of UCSC, a member of the research team, said.

With this result, the full Milky Way must be up to 2 million light-years across. As such, it seems to extend to the neighboring giant galaxy Andromeda.

It is possible that these two galaxies are not separated because the Fairy Queen is also a “monster” galaxy, possibly also possessing a wide open halo like the Milky Way.

This suggests that the Milky Way and the Andromeda – two “monsters” expected to collide violently in the next 2 million years – may actually have collided in the present. The next two billion years is just the distance for two bright main disks to approach each other.

Both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies have swallowed many other smaller galaxies and peacefully grew, reaching sizes among the giants in the galactic world to date. However, their collision is expected to cause great damage to both, because they are both massive, in which the Earth is forecast to be in danger of being thrown out of the “habitable zone” of the solar system.