Scientists discover new feature that makes the Milky Way unique
Only a millionth of simulated galaxies were located in a cosmological wall like the Local Sheet and had a mass like the Milky Way's.
The Copernican Bias describes the assumption that Earth and the Milky Way should be assumed to be completely average places in the universe as we now understand that we are not the center of the universe.
When conducting simulations, astronomers often assume that any point in a simulation is as good as any other, but the team's findings indicate that more precise location choices may be important when making measurements.
“So, the Milky Way is, in a way, special,” said research lead Miguel Aragón in an article by the Royal Astronomical Society. “The Earth is very obviously special, the only home of life that we know. But it’s not the center of the Universe, or even the Solar System. And the Sun is just an ordinary star among billions in the Milky Way. Even our galaxy seemed to be just another spiral galaxy among billions of others in the observable Universe.”
Latest discovery what makes our milky way special. NASA
“You might have to travel a half a billion light years from the Milky Way, past many, many galaxies, to find another cosmological wall with a galaxy like ours.”
Research lead Miguel Aragón
“You might have to travel a half a billion light years from the Milky Way, past many, many galaxies, to find another cosmological wall with a galaxy like ours,” added Aragón. “That’s a couple of hundred times farther away than the nearest large galaxy around us, Andromeda.”
Dr Mark Neyrinck, another member of the team, stressed that researchers do need to be careful when qualifying certain properties as "special."
"If we added a ridiculously restrictive condition on a galaxy, such as that it must contain the paper we wrote about this, we would certainly be the only galaxy in the observable Universe like that. But we think this ‘too big for its wall’ property is physically meaningful and observationally relevant enough to call out as really being special.”
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