Astronomers discover the edge of our galaxy

In an effort to find the outer limits of our galaxy, astronomers have discovered more than 200 stars that form the edge of the Milky Way, and more than a million light-years – almost halfway to Andromeda Galaxy.

the The 208 stars identified by the researchers are known as RR Lyrae stars, which are stars of variable brightness as seen from Earth. These stars are usually old, bright, and dim at regular intervals, a mechanism that allows scientists to calculate how far away they are. They are. Calculating the distance to these RR Lyrae stars, the The team found that the farthest from the group was located about halfway between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, one of our next cosmic galaxies-Neighbor’s door.

Raja GuhaThakurta said in press release. GuhaThakurta is Professor and Chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz. “Our galaxy and Andromeda are both very big, and there is no space between the two galaxies.”

The Milky Way is made up of several different parts, the first of which is a thin spiral The disk is about 100,000 light.through years. ayour home The solar system is located on one of the arms of this disk. Inner and outer aura circumference disk, these halos contain some of the oldest stars in our galaxy.

Previous studies have placed the edge of the outer halo at 1 million light-years from the Milky Way’s center, but based on the new work, the edge of this halo should be about 1.04 million light-years from the galactic center. Yuting Feng, a doctoral student at the university working with GuhaThakurta, led the study and is submission of results this week At the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

“We have been able to use these variable stars as reliable tracers to determine distances,” said Yuting Feng, a doctoral student at the university working with GuhaThakurta. “Our observations confirm theoretical estimates of the size of the corona, so this is an important result.”

Space is vast and lonely-But We can feel more comfortable Knowing that our galaxy neighbor Closer than we thought.