00:00The Milky Way galaxy is where we all live. It's a spiral galaxy, which seems fairly ordinary when it comes to galactic composition.
00:10There's just one problem. Scientists are now saying it's too large for its neighborhood.
00:14The local sheet is a cluster of galaxies on a single plane, and the Milky Way is part of it.
00:19And when physicists simulated a massive area of space around a billion light years in size, they noticed something interesting.
00:25More often than not, Milky Way-sized galaxies do not emerge as part of these sheets.
00:29Meaning it's likely more rare than we ever expected.
00:32Astronomer Joe Silk had this to say about the findings.
00:35If you could see the nearest dozen or so large galaxies easily in the sky, you would see that they all nearly lie on a ring embedded in the local sheet.
00:42That's a little bit special in itself.
00:44What we newly found is that other walls of galaxies in the universe like the local sheet very seldom seem to have a galaxy inside them that's as massive as the Milky Way.
00:52And they say this should sort of change the way we look at and examine our place in the universe moving forward.
00:57Living in a bit of a unique galaxy in a particularly boring yet safe solar system on a planet like none other we've ever found.
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