Milky Way in suburbia

ASTRONOMERS have confirmed that Earth is just a little planet in the suburbs of an average galaxy. A team from Sussex and Glasgow universities has measured the size of the Milky Way and found it to be slightly smaller than the average size of neighbouring galaxies.

The researchers used information from the Hubble space telescope and triangulation techniques to measure galaxies. The good news for space science is that our neighbours are typical of the universe, which allows wide application of the data.