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Written by spacetravel.org
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Sunday, 15 January 2006 20:29 |
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Astronomers of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have discovered and mapped a huge, but very faint, structure about 30,000 light-years from Earth, toward the constellation Virgo, within the confines of the Milky Way. The structure contains thousands of stars spread over an area almost 5,000 times the size of a full moon.
The structure does not follow any of the Milky Ways three main components: a bulge of stars at the centre of the Galaxy, a flattened disk of stars where the Sun is located, and an extended, roughly spherical, stellar halo. Astronomers believe that the structure is probably a dwarf galaxy that is merging into the Milky Way.
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