Astronomers have discovered “Maggie”, the largest object ever found in our galaxy (photo)

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January 12 2022, 1:13 pm

A team of astronomers at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg has unveiled the largest object ever found in the Milky Way: a stellar gas cloud 3,900 light-years long and about 150 light-years wide. The vast system is located about 55,000 light-years from us, five times larger than the largest known gas clouds ever known, no more than 800 light-years away. Scientists have named the object ‘Maggie’, referring to the Magdalena River, the longest river in Colombia. The discovery was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. This is how he critiqued it ABC.

The flat disk, which contains most of the Milky Way’s objects, was found by astronomers looking for objects outside the galaxy’s main plane.

Because it was outside of that plane, and because of its dimensions, it was relatively easy to spot Maggie.

“We still don’t know exactly how it got there,” explains Jonas Syed, the first author of the article. But the fiber extends about 1,600 light-years below the Milky Way plane. Thanks to its comparative isolation, the team was able to calculate how the gas moves within the cloud, and found that it does everything at the same speed and in the same direction, confirming that it is a unique system and not the side of multiple clouds. On the side.

Juan Soler, the astronomer who first discovered Maggie, explains:

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