The Milky Way is twice the size we thought it was

[SF]

It took just a couple of hours using data available on the internet for University of Sydney scientists to discover that the Milky Way is twice as wide as previously thought.


Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler led a team that has found that our galaxy - a flattened spiral about 100,000 light years across - is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years that had been previously thought.


Proving not all science requires big, expensive apparatus, Professor Gaensler and colleagues, Dr Greg Madsen, Dr Shami Chatterjee and PhD student Ann Mao, downloaded data from the internet and analysed it in a spreadsheet.

http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=2163

 

[wolram]

Sounds all most to simple, is there that much reliable info on the web?

 

[kamerling]

lots of scientists will put the data they produced online. You canf find links in their articles
at http://adswww.harvard.edu/index.html or arxiv.
I can't find a scientific publication by those authors about this however, aside from the
sidney university press release