The Milky Way is twice the size we thought it was 20 February
2008 It took just a couple of hours using data available on the
internet for University of Sydney scientists to discover that
the Milky Way is twice as wide as previously thought.
Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler led a team that has
found that our galaxy - a flattened spiral about 100,000 light
years across - is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light
years that had been previously thought. Proving not all science
requires big, expensive apparatus, Professor Gaensler and
colleagues, Dr Greg Madsen, Dr Shami Chatterjee and PhD student
Ann Mao, downloaded data from the internet and analysed it in a
spreadsheet. "We were tossing around ideas about the size of the
Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers
that everyone uses. It took us just a few hours to calculate
this for ourselves. We thought we had to be wrong, so we checked
and rechecked and couldn't find any mistakes." The University of
Sydney team's analysis diffe