IllustrisTNG project<\/a>. The team simulated a volume of the Universe nearly a billion light-years away that contains millions of galaxies. Only a handful \u2013 about a millionth of all the galaxies in the simulation \u2013 were embedded in a cosmological wall like the Local Sheet and as massive as our home galaxy.<\/p>\nAccording to the team, it may be necessary to consider the special environment around the Milky Way when running simulations, to avoid a so-called \u2018Copernican bias\u2019 in making scientific inferences from the galaxies around us.<\/p>\n
This bias, describing the successive removal of our special status in the nearly 500 years since Copernicus demoted the Earth from being at the centre of the cosmos, would come from assuming that we reside in a completely average place in the Universe.<\/p>\n
To simulate observations, astronomers sometimes assume that any point in a simulation such as IllustrisTNG works, but the team\u2019s findings indicate that it may be important to use precise locations to make such measurements.<\/p>\n
What makes our galaxy so special?<\/h3>\n \u201cSo, the Milky Way is, in a way, special,\u201d said Miguel Arag\u00f3n, who led the research project. \u201cThe Earth is obviously special, being the only home of life we know. But it\u2019s not the centre of the Universe or even the Solar System.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Milky Way doesn\u2019t have a particularly special mass or type. There are lots of spiral galaxies that look roughly like it,\u201d explained Joe Silk, another of the researchers.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it is rare if you consider its surroundings. If you could see the nearest dozen or so large galaxies easily in the sky, you would see that they all nearly lie on a ring, embedded in the Local Sheet. That\u2019s special in itself. What we newly found is that other walls of galaxies in the Universe like the Local Sheet very seldom seem to have a galaxy inside them that\u2019s as massive as the Milky Way.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou might have to travel half a billion light years from the Milky Way, past many galaxies, to find another cosmological wall with a galaxy like ours,\u201d Arag\u00f3n commented. \u201cThat\u2019s a couple of hundred times farther away than the nearest large galaxy around us, Andromeda.\u201d<\/p>\n
Neyrinck, a co-researcher of the project concluded: \u201cYou do have to be careful, though, choosing properties that qualify 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we think this \u2018too big for its wall\u2019 property is physically meaningful and observationally relevant enough to call out as really being special.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A team of astronomers has found that the Milky Way is too big for its cosmological wall, something yet to be seen in other galaxies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":29099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[771],"tags":[818],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
The Milky Way is more unique than we previously thought<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n