Via careful measurements with the Very Long Baseline Array, Mark Reid and colleagues have revised the rotation rate of the Milky Way, thus adding mass and pace to its magnificent gyre…
Milky Way — the galaxy — not so snack-sized
…thus it’s now measured to rotate at 254 km/s, not the 220 km/s used for decades by most astronomers.
Mark Reid works for Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics. Their news post is available here, but it’s not as informative as the MSNBC report, which summarises what Reid presented at the current 213th AAS meeting.