NEW YORK — Our corner of the Milky Way galaxy may be a bigger deal than scientists thought.
The galaxy is shaped like a disk, with four major arms of stars, dust and gas spiraling out from the center. Our solar system lies at the edge of what’s called the Local Arm, which resembles a separate piece of an arm.
Historically, the Local Arm “didn’t get much respect. … People thought it was just a tiny little thing,” said Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. But a new paper he co-authored concludes it is bigger than scientists thought.
Researchers calculated that it stretches more than 20,000 light-years long, maybe about four times what scientists had thought before, he said. That’s still a lot shorter than the major arms.