There is something incredibly fascinating about our universe, that all of humanity is trying to understand it. And one of the most popular aspects of our Universe is the Milky Way, which contains our solar system. It is based upon our galaxy's appearance from the earth. Milky way is a large barred spiral galaxy, and all the stars we see in the night sky are in our own Milky Way galaxy. And now some researchers have said that Milky Way is being pulled apart by a neighbouring galaxy, and its gravitational force is causing our home galaxy to twist and deform.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with an estimated visible diameter of 1.9 million light-years. It is estimated to contain 100-400 billion stars and at least that number of planets. The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea from the Greek. In research published in the Journal of Nature Astronomy, researchers found that the Milky Way is being pulled by a gravitational force. According to their astronomers, the Milky Way galaxy is being slowly twisted and deformed by the gravitational force of a neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). It is being pulled by the gravitational force of the dark matter halo surrounding the LMC. And this event with LMC has resulted in the deformation of our galaxy, which is home to more than 500 solar systems. The Large Magellanic (LMC) is named after the first man to travel the Earth, the 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan.
From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed within. The solar system is located at a radius of about 27,000 light-years from the Galactic Centre, on the inner edge of the Orion Arm, one of the spiral-shaped concentrations of gas and dust. The discovery revealed in Nature Astronomy journal challenges the belief that the Milky Way is static, and will expect researchers to directly formulate a new model that illustrates the evolution of the galaxy. A statistical model was utilized to calculate the speed of the Milky Way's most remote stars by researchers at the University of Edinburgh. The lead author of this research, Dr Michael Peterson along with his team, found that the LMC stretched the Milky Way boundary around 700 million years ago. Prior research has indicated that the LMC is encircled by dark matter, which is a substance that does not reflect, emit or absorb any light. This dark matter encircles the satellite galaxy and strongly disturb the texture and motion of the Milky Way.
Dr Michael Peterson explained that “The effects of this relatively recent collision are still being witnessed today, and should force a revision of the birth of the Milky Way”. Presently, it has been verified that the attraction of the dark matter in LMC is pulling the Milky Way's galactic disc at 20 miles a second. Researchers have concluded that our galaxy was not moving in the direction of the LMC's current location but was being pulled towards the constellations Pegasus in the northern sky. And this happens because the LMC is floating away at an even faster speed of 230 miles a second. The results of this research will now mandate researchers to re-evaluate how the Milky Way galaxy was shaped. This finding similarly brings to light the vibrant interplay between the neighbour galaxies, and only appearing time will explain the consequences of the connections between these two galaxies.
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Reference:
- www.sciencedaily.com
- www.nature.com
- www.news18.com