Celestia Forums

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009 ... kyway.html
http://www.time.com/time/health/article ... 84,00.html

To quote from the article above "Take that, Andromeda!"

I "love" these quick science writers!

Entering these days into Google the two words: size MilkyWay,

you find a host of superficial public science pages about that allegedly NEW discovery by scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

It seems they all copied from one another!

No one of my "beloved science writer friends" assesses that we have pretty good evidence for this finding since May 2006 or possibly even earlier. No surprise: they are mainly out for reporting "hot stories" rather than providing a balanced account of what's really going on in this exciting subject.

Here is what I wrote about this issue in this forum 2 years ago:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10455&hilit=size+milkyway&start=11

---------------------------------------Nov 11 2006-----------------------------------

Fridger wrote:Another interesting aspect is that there are many pulsars
to be found in arc-type arrangements much further out
than the rim of our template. This again matches
perfectly with this interesting paper


by E.S. Levine and friends,
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0605728

Here the outer spiral structure of the MilkyWay is
inferred from a map of the perturbed surface density of
neutral hydrogen! These data indicate that our Milkyway
is about a factor of two larger in size than what was
commonly thought.

I think we should update the catalog to the FULL present
set of pulsars and make a regular catalog for the
distribution. It's great stuff, indeed.

Since I would of course extract all relevant pulsar data
along with names and coordinates, we could always
discuss how they are best marked or displayed.

Bye Fridger

Here is a plot from that paper, with the location of our sun marked as well (location (0,8,5) in the plot):

In the bottom image (with median divided out), the spiral arm pattern can be clearly seen far outside the usual MilkyWay disk in this map of the atomic hydrogen (HI) surface density perturbations!!



Fridger

t00fri wrote:I "love" these quick science writers!
Here is what I wrote about this issue in this forum 2 years ago:

Hey, appreciate the good information here Doctor.
Thanks for that!

-Brain-Dead

I'll admit I thought this was new news too.