How to Weigh the Milky Way (IMAGE)
Caption
This is the Northern Hemisphere of the sky as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Stellar streams stick out from the vast number of stars in this view, of which most lie within the Milky Way disk. The Palomar 5 stream is the densest of the stellar streams discovered so far and turned out to be a perfect scale and yardstick for our understanding of the Milky Way.
Credit
Figure 1 has been prepared by Ana Bonaca, graduate student at Yale University, in collaboration with Marla Geha and Nitya Kallivayalil. It uses data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a consortium of participating institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Energy Office of Science.
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