We’re spinning faster than ever thought, and we’re more likely than ever to collide with another galaxy, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics concluded after performing new measurements on the Milky Way.

 

Our galaxy appears to be spinning 100,000 miles per hour faster than known, which also causes its mass to increase by 50 percent. The mass increase determines in turn a greater gravitational pull, making the collision with other galaxies likelier than before, the astronomers explained.

 

The specialists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope to create the map of the Milky Way in an attempt to recreate the structure of the Milky Way in an accurate manner.

 

The observations are not easy to make, simply because they have to be made from inside the galaxy, limiting the overall perspective on the structure and motion of the Milky Way. But with the help of the VLBA instrument, the astronomers have obtained highly-accurate measurements based on the triangulation method.

 

The regions of intense star formation in our galaxy contributed to the VLBA observations, acting as bright landmarks for the instrument, the astronomers explained. Repeated observations of these regions at times when the Earth is at opposite sides of its orbit allowed them to measure the shift of an object’s position against a more distant background, providing the most accurate measurements to date.

 

Among the findings, they revealed that our Galaxy is likely to have four spiral arms instead of two, but that is one aspect that needs further measurements. Furthermore, they said, the Milky Way seems to have now an increased risk of colliding with the Andromeda Galaxy or other smaller galaxies.