Are you feeling small and insignificant? Well, let me tell you something that will make you feel even smaller! Our tiny little planet Earth is so far away from the edges of the Milky Way galaxy that if you were to travel at the speed of light, it would take you over about 26,000 light-years to get there!
That’s like trying to swim across the Pacific Ocean with a pair of flippers made out of spaghetti! So next time you’re feeling down, just remember, at least you’re not stuck on the galaxy’s edge with nothing but cosmic dust and lonely supernovae for company.
Astronomers discover over 200 stars from the outskirts of our Galaxy
According to Gizmodo, astronomers managed to find the edge of our Milky Way galaxy after locating 208 RR Lyrae stars near its ‘border’ with the Andromeda galaxy.
The team discovered that the most distant RR Lyrae star was situated approximately equidistant from both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy by measuring the distance to these stars.
GuhaThakurta from the University of California Santa Cruz, where he serves as a professor and chair of astronomy and astrophysics, stated in a press release:
This study is redefining what constitutes the outer limits of our galaxy,
Our galaxy and Andromeda are both so big, there’s hardly any space between the two galaxies.
The Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31, is a spiral galaxy that is located approximately 2.5 million light-years away from Earth. In terms of size, it is one of the largest galaxies in the local group of galaxies, which also includes our own Milky Way galaxy.
Andromeda has an estimated diameter of about 220,000 light-years, which makes it about twice the size of the Milky Way. It also has a mass of around 1.5 trillion times the mass of the sun and contains around 1 trillion stars.
