Milky Way's hot gaseous Halo spins like a disk!

Image credit: NASA

New Delhi: Recently astronomers have discovered that Milky way's massive reservoir of hot gas, Halo- that contains our stars, planet and, dust is spinning and that too at a dizzying speed.

Astronomers from the University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) highlighted that Halo is spinning in the same direction and approximately with the same speed as Milky Way's disk.

Halo is spinning at about 400,000 mph and the disk moves at 540,000 mph.

The new NASA-funded research using the archival data obtained by XMM Newton, a European Space Agency telescope, was recently published in the Astrophysical journal. The study focuses on our galaxy’s hot gaseous halo, which is several times larger than the Milky Way disk and composed of ionized plasma, according to NASA reports.

This groundbreaking discovery will be extremely beneficial in studying the formation of the galaxy. “Now that we know about the rotation, theorists will begin to use this to learn how our Milky Way galaxy formed – and its eventual destiny,” says Joel Bregman, a U-M LSA professor of astronomy. Scientists are also viewing halo's movement as the hiding place for some of the missing matters of Milky Way galaxy.