More News
1/5/09: Milky Way a Swifter Spinner, More Massive, New Measure-
ments Show
12/19/08: NRAO Welcomes Taiwan as a New North American ALMA Partner
12/18/08: ALMA Observatory Equipped with its First Antenna
12/17/08: Astronomers Find Most Distant Water in the Universe
10/20/08: Cosmic Lens Reveals Distant Galactic Violence
News Center
Welcome to the News Center. Here you will find NRAO press releases, images, video and audio content, news articles, and other related media.
Artist's Conception of our Milky Way Galaxy: Blue, green dots indicate distance measurements (Credit: Robert Hurt, IPAC; Mark Reid, CfA, NRAO/AUI/NSF).
Milky Way a Swifter Spinner, More Massive, New Measurements Show
Fasten your seat belts -- we're faster, heavier, and more likely to collide than we thought. Astronomers making high-precision measurements of the Milky Way say our home Galaxy is rotating about 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously understood.
That increase in speed, said Mark Reid, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, increases the Milky Way's mass by 50 percent, bringing it even with the Andromeda Galaxy. "No longer will we think of the Milky Way as the little sister of the Andromeda Galaxy in our Local Group family."
The larger mass, in turn, means a greater gravitational pull that increases the likelihood of collisions with the Andromeda galaxy or smaller nearby galaxies.
Our Solar System is about 28,000 light-years from the Milky Way's center. At that distance, the new observations indicate, we're moving at about 600,000 miles per hour in our Galactic orbit, up from the previous estimate of 500,000 miles per hour.
The scientists are using the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope to remake the map of the Milky Way. Taking advantage of the VLBA's unparalleled ability to make extremely detailed images, the team is conducting a long-term program to measure distances and motions in our Galaxy. They reported their results at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Long Beach, California.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.