Astronomers discover ‘MAGGI’, the largest object ever seen in our galaxy (PHOTO)

Labatilla

January 12 2022, 1:13 pm

A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg has just launched the discovery of the largest object ever observed in the Milky Way: a stylized gas cloud 3,900 light-years long and about 150 light-years wide. Located about 55,000 light years from us, the giant structure is five times larger than the largest gaseous clouds known to date, no more than 800 light years in size. Scientists named the object “Maggie” in reference to the Magdalena River, the longest in Colombia. The discovery was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. This is how I reviewed it ABC.

Astronomers located the gas filaments while searching for objects outside the galaxy’s main plane, the flat disk that contains most of the Milky Way’s material.

Because he was outside of this level and because of his dimensions, it was relatively easy to spot a mage.

“We still don’t know exactly how you got there,” explains Jonas Seid, the paper’s first author. But the thread extends about 1,600 light-years below the plane of the Milky Way.” Thanks to its relative isolation, the team was able to calculate how gas moves within the cloud, and found that it does everything at the same speed and in the same direction, confirming that it is a unique structure and not from many sides of the clouds. .

“Maggie was already known in previous evaluations of the data,” explains Juan Soler, the astronomer who first discovered Maggie. But only the current study proves beyond a reasonable doubt that it is a coherent structure.”

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