Astronomers discover the largest structure in the Milky Way – Maggie – Burning Issues

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Maggie-The longest structures in the Milky Way

Astronomers have discovered what may be the longest structure in the Milky Way : an unusual cloud of hydrogen.

What is Maggie?

The gigantic structure, which is more than 3,900 light-years long and around 150 light-years wide, is located roughly 55,000 light-years away from the solar system.
The team named the lengthy cloud “Maggie,” which is short for the Magdalena River, the longest river in Colombia.
Juan Soler, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Germany first detected the Maggie.
Astronomers discovered the cloud as part of The HI/OH/Recombination line survey of the Milky Way (THOR).
The survey, which relies on data collected by the radio observatory called the Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, looks for objects outside the main plane of the Milky Way, which is the flattened disk where most matter in the galaxy is found.
Because Maggie is located outside that plane, the structure was much easier to spot than it normally would have been.
Gas within Maggie: All the gas was moving at the same speed and in the same direction, which confirmed that it was indeed a single structure and not multiple clouds sitting side by side.
Maggie isn’t just bigger than other gas clouds; it’s also made up of a unique form of hydrogen. Maggie is made up of 92% atomic hydrogen, which makes it particularly interesting to researchers.
Around 8% of Maggie’s hydrogen is molecular and appears to be concentrated into certain points along the cloud.

The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) is a centimeter-wavelength radio astronomy observatory located in central New Mexico on the Plains of San Agustin,
The VLA comprises twenty-eight 25-meter radio telescopes (27 of which are operational while one is always rotating through maintenance) deployed in a Y-shaped array and all the equipment, instrumentation, and computing power to function as an interferometer.

What Is a Galaxy?

A galaxy is a huge collection of gas, dust, and billions of stars and their solar systems. A galaxy is held together by gravity. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, also has a supermassive black hole in the middle.

MILKY WAY QUICK FACTS

Galaxy type:Spiral
– Age:6 billion years (and counting)
– Size: 100,000 light-years across
– Number of stars: about 200 billion
– Rotation time: 230 million years