The Milky Way just got bigger

Published on Tuesday 6 January 2009 00:54

THE Milky Way is larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers thought.

For decades, stargazers thought when it came to the major neighbouring galaxies, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda, but not any more.

Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three- dimensional fashion and found it to be 15 per cent broader. More importantly, they pronounced it denser, with 50 per cent more mass. The new findings were presented yesterday at the American Astronomical Society's convention in Long Beach, California.

Mark Reid, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said it was the cosmic equivalent of him suddenly bulking from his 5ft 5in, 10 stone frame, to 6ft 3in and 15 stone.

"Previously, we thought Andromeda was dominant, and we were the little sister," Mr Reid said. "But now it's more like we're fraternal twins."

That is not necessarily good news. A bigger Milky Way means that it could go crashing violently into the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy sooner than predicted – though still billions of years from now.