Scientists Find Giant Ring of Stars Circling Milky Way

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, January 07, 2003

Scientists Find Giant Ring of Stars Circling Milky Way

Evidence has been found for a vast ring of stars that may completely encircle the Milky Way, two research groups announced on Monday.

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Evidence has been found for a vast ring of stars that may completely encircle the Milky Way, two research groups announced on Monday.

The ring, which has the appearance of a giant doughnut, is madeup of hundreds of millions of stars surrounding the main disc of our galaxy, the BBC and New Scientist reported.

"Clearly we don't yet know for certain if it encircles the entire galaxy but it looks quite promising," said Mike Irwin of Cambridge University, one of the researchers behind the discovery.

The research was presented on Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in the northwestern US city of Seattle.

A team led by Heidi Newberg at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute discovered an arc of stars all of which were equidistant from the center of the galaxy. The US team was monitoring the Milky Way's outer edge using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey of the United States.

The second team, which included Irwin, performed a survey of a section of sky 100 degrees away using the Isaac Newton Telescopes on La Palma, one of the Canary Islands. Their original aim was to study our neighboring galaxy Andromeda.

They found a similar pattern of stars at the same distance as the first group, suggesting that a giant ring of stars could stretch around our galaxy.

The ring is estimated to contain several hundred million stars -- about 1 percent of the total number of stars in our galaxy.

The astronomers said they were not sure how the ring formed. One possibility is that the stars originated within our galaxy butwere flung out over time. Another is that the gravity of the MilkyWay tore a smaller satellite galaxy to pieces leaving this outer debris.

Detailed studies of the ring could help explain how galaxies evolve.

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