Milky Way twice as thick as thought

Monty Python comedian Eric Idle in his popular Galaxy Song has it that our galaxy is 100,000 light years side-to-side and 16,000 light years thick.

One of the world's leading astronomers said Wednesday that one of the world's funniest songwriters was more accurate than science textbooks that have the Milky Way 6,000 light years thick.

Our galaxy is a flattened spiral 100,000 light years across and 12,000 light years thick, according to Australian astrophysicist Bryan Gaensler.

"We were tossing around ideas about the size of the galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses," said Professor Gaensler, formerly of Harvard and MIT in the United States.

"It took us just a few hours to calculate this for ourselves. We thought we had to be wrong, so we checked and rechecked and couldn't find any mistakes," he was qyoted as saying by DPA in a statement released in Sydney.