The diameter of the spiral disk of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years. By comparison, the edge of the galaxy is ten times farther from the center, the researchers note.

Specialists now know a lot about the Milky Way, but this does not mean that there are not many unanswered questions about our galaxy. One example of this is the size of the object, which we can actually talk about. He wrote that astronomers have now been able to determine that, too EurekAlert Scientific portal.

Scientists from the University of California discovered 208 new stars while searching the outer limits of the Milky Way. It lies at the edge of the galaxy, about a million light-years far away – half the distance of the Andromeda Galaxy.

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The 208 new stars are RR Lyrae stars, meaning their brightness can vary as seen from Earth. These celestial bodies are usually old, sometimes shining and then fading. Thanks to this, scientists can calculate how far they are.

According to Raja GuhaThakurta, one of the authors of the study, current calculations have shown that both the Milky Way and Andromeda are so large that there is no space between the two galaxies.

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According to the researchers, the spiral disk, on one of whose arms the solar system lies, is about 100,000 light-years across. However, the Milky Way is surrounded by an inner and outer halo (halo), the maximum extent of which is 1.04 million light-years from the galactic center. According to our current knowledge, this is the boundary of the Milky Way.

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