Our galaxy could be 50 percent bigger than previously thought

The Milky Way just got a whole lot more impressive.

New research published in The Astrophysical Journal suggests that the galaxy may be as much as 50 percent bigger than scientists previously thought. It likely spans 150,000 light-years, rather than 100,000 light-years, as was believed in the past. The researchers used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to reach the conclusion.

The reason for the sudden change of heart? The Milky Way's concentric ring of stars around the center of the galaxy wasn't actually a ring — it was a ripple, meaning the galaxy expands much further. The Monoceros Ring, which is more than 65,000 light-years from the middle of the Milky Way, may actually be a part of it.

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"In essence, what we found is that the disk of the Milky Way isn't just a disk of stars in a flat plane — it's corrugated," Dr. Heidi Newberg, a professor at Rensslaer Polytechnic University who helped discover the Monoceros Ring in 2012, told The Huffington Post. "We now understand that the galaxy didn't end; the disk is just going up and down — in and out of our view."