Rare feature of the Milky Way discovered
(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of scientists within the framework of the IllustrisTNG project modeled the volume of the Universe and determined the sizes of galaxies.
The study unexpectedly showed that our Milky Way is a very rare and special galaxy, which turned out to be too big for its “cosmological wall”.
Scientists have long been interested in the question: Is our Milky Way special? What place does he occupy in the universe?
An international group of astronomers has taken up the search for an answer within the framework of a new project.
Using computer simulations, she was able to determine the parameters of a huge number of galaxies.
Naturally, scientists paid special attention to our own galaxy and made a rather unexpected discovery. A new study shows that the Milky Way is too big for its “cosmological wall”.
The authors of the work explain that the cosmological wall is a flat arrangement of galaxies surrounding other galaxies, characterized by so-called voids.
The latter are located on both sides and, as seen from the side, compress the galaxies, giving them a visually flattened shape.
The cosmological wall is thought to affect how the Milky Way and nearby galaxies rotate on their axes.
There is an opinion that it is this wall that creates a certain order in our galaxy, thanks to which it is a well-organized, and not a chaotic object.
It is also known that galaxies are usually inferior in size to their cosmological walls. However, the Milky Way, as it turned out, is almost a unique galaxy in this respect.
According to simulations, our Milky Way is surprisingly massive compared to its cosmological wall, which scientists call an extremely rare cosmic phenomenon.
The authors of the work say that they were able to model the volume of the universe almost one billion light-years across, which contains millions of galaxies.
And only a tiny fraction of them – about a millionth of all the galaxies in the simulation – turned out to be similar to our Milky Way, that is, they are also more massive than their own cosmological walls.
“So the Milky Way is special in some way,” said lead researcher Miguel Aragon. “Earth is obviously special too, because it’s the only ‘house of life’ we know.
But it’s not the center of the universe, or even the center of the solar system. By the way, the sun is “It’s just an ordinary star among the billions of stars in the Milky Way.
But until now, our galaxy seemed to be just another spiral galaxy among the billions of others in the observable universe.”
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