How long does it take to traverse the vast Milky Way with the speed of light?

The Milky Way, the galaxy that holds us and the Solar System, is a large place. It is so big that we may never get out of it. So if there is a chance, how long will we go?

The galaxy's galaxy disk is much larger than we previously knew. According to the latest study, the size of the Milky Way is about 200,000 light-years, meaning that if we ride on a ship moving at the speed of light, it takes 200,000 years to go through the Milky Way. from one end to the other.

The Milky Way is a huge spiral galaxy, so big that we will never get out of it horizontally.(Photo: National Geographic).

The diameter of the Milky Way that we know before is much smaller than that. To get such figures, scientists have found traces of heavy metals located at the edge of the Milky Way, which are important materials for making stars. Thus, outside the old boundary of the Milky Way, there are still many big stars.

'We have found evidence that there are a significant number of heavy metal stars farther away than the galaxy's boundary, that is, outside the Milky Way's old limit , ' co-authored. of the study, Carlos Allende is a researcher at the Canary Island Astrophysics Research Institute, said.

This new study gives a figure of 200,000 light-years to the Milky Way's diameter, compared to 100,000 light-years to 160,000 light-years in previous insights. (A light-year is the distance that light can travel for a year, about 10 trillion km).

Compared to the Sun's position in the Milky Way, astronomers estimate the distance of those distant stars to be three times greater than the distance from the Sun to the center of the Milky Way. Some stars are even farther away, four times the distance.

We are very difficult to measure or calculate the Milky Way metrics correctly, because we are inside it.(Photo: Babak Tafreshi).

This study was done from analyzing sky survey data from the Apache Peak Milky Observatory System (APOGEE) and Polycrystalline Spectral Telescope (LAMOST), which helped to collect data about the spectrum of the stars. The spectrum of a star is the separation of their light into different colors, helping to identify the molecules present in that star.

This is not the first time scientists have adjusted the size of a galaxy. According to recent studies, scientists say the galaxy has a mass similar to the Milky Way, not much larger than previously thought. The results of this study greatly affect the simulation of the time that the two galaxies will collide after 4 billion years.

The research on the new size of the Milky Way is published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.