Monoceros Ring

The Milky Way galaxy.

The Monoceros Ring (monoceros: Greek for 'unicorn') is a long, complex, ring of stars that wraps around the Milky Way three times. This is proposed to consist of a stellar stream torn from the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy by tidal forces as part of the process of merging with the Milky Way over a period of billions of years, although this view has long been disputed.[1] The ring contains 100 million solar masses and is 200,000 light years long.[2]

The stream of stars was first reported in 2002 by astronomers conducting the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In the course of investigating this ring of stars, and a closely spaced group of globular clusters similar to those associated with the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, they discovered the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy.[3]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Momany2006 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Ibata, Rodrigo; Gibson, Brad (April 2007). "The Ghosts of Galaxies Past". Scientific American. 296 (4): 40–45. Bibcode:2007SciAm.296d..40I. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0407-40. PMID 17479629.
  3. ^ Newberg; et al. (1 April 2002). "The Ghost of Sagittarius and Lumps in the Halo of the Milky Way". The Astrophysical Journal. 569 (1): 245–274. arXiv:astro-ph/0111095. Bibcode:2002ApJ...569..245N. doi:10.1086/338983. S2CID 16909562.