NASA has revealed that the Halo around the Milky Way Galaxy that had been thought to be still for so many years moves at the same speed and in the same direction as the galaxy. The spinning speed of the halo is measured at 400,000 mph, and that of the disk is 540,000mph.
The speed was measured by observing shifts in wavelengths of light. The researchers used extremely hot oxygen to measure the shifts around the sky. This study conducted at University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts could help better understand how atoms form planets.The Halo is made of ionized plasma and its size is several times bigger than the disk of Milky Way.
The Halo is made of ionized plasma and its size is several times bigger than the disk of Milky Way. Earlier it was assumed that Milky Way spins around the hot reservoir of hot gas that remained stationary. Mr. Hodges Kluck of University of Michigan said
It tells us that this hot atmosphere is the source of a lot of the matter in the disk.
Scientists say that 80 percent of the matter in the universe is made of dark matter and so far it can only be detected by gravitational pull. Out of remaining 20 percent, some was kept disappearing into the halo. Now that this discovery has been made, it will be easier to find out how and why the matter went into it in the first place. Very recently some of the missing matter had been discovered in the Halo.
Joel Bregman, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Michigan said that this could lead more theorists into an in-depth story of how the universe was formed.
The new research funded by NASA used data gathered by XMM-Newton and was recently published in the Astrophysical Journal.
This discovery has the potential to redefine the speed of other objects in the galaxy. Since the measurement of speed is only a relative measurement in space because of the lack of a medium, this could well be a discovery worth much more. However, since the speed difference between the galaxy and the Halo isn’t a lot, this may not amount to much.
