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Australian Scientists Helped Finding Milky Way’s Twins
Scientists from University of Western Australia were amongst a group of astronomers who found the first group of galaxies that is just like ours, Science Daily reports. Astronomers have been awarded further time on telescopes in New South Wales and Chile to study these Milky Way twin systems now that they’ve been found.
Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Earth comes from billions of dim stars that surround us yet finding one alike is very rare. Astronomers haven’t been able to tell just how rare until now, with the discovery of not just one but two exact matches amongst the hundreds of thousands of galaxies surveyed.
We found about 3% of galaxies similar to the Milky Way have companion galaxies like the Magellanic Clouds, which is very rare indeed. In total we found 14 galaxy systems that are similar to ours, with two of those being an almost exact match,” says astronomer Dr Aaron Dr Robotham involved with the project.
“Everything had to come together at once: we needed telescopes good enough to detect not just galaxies but their faint companions, we needed to look at large sections of the sky, and most of all we needed to make sure no galaxies were missed in the survey”
Another startling discovery about the “Milky Way” came just a few months ago when NASA found out the entire Milky Way would collapse with the neighbouring galaxy in 4 billion years. They are moving towards another, the scenario was described like a baseball batter watching an oncoming fastball.
The project involved scientists from all over the world. Dr Robotham, jointly from the University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), joint venture between Curtin University and The University of Western, and the University of St Andrews in Scotland, searched for groups of galaxies similar to ours in the most detailed map of the local Universe yet, the Galaxy and Mass Assembly survey (GAMA).
