A band of hundred of millions of stars discovered orbiting the galaxy.

[Swede]

The ring's encircling diameter is estimated at 120,000 light-years, the teams reported. Its thickness is about 10 times that of the rest of the galaxy, extending well above and below the galactic plane. Gravity, primarily from unseen dark matter of an unknown nature, holds the ring of up to 500 million stars -- about the stellar population of small galaxies -- in a nearly circular orbit.

Such a vast congregation of stars in a coherent ring had remained hidden from view because it lies in the same plane as the Milky Way disk and so was obscured by intervening stars, gas and dust. It was hard to distinguish the ring stars from the other matter and impossible to recognize their number or their organization in a discrete torus.

(Oops,here's page one, edit).
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05EFDA1531F937A25752C0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1


http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05EFDA1531F937A25752C0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

[lostnotforgotten]

1. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

Hamlet

[silverweb]

8. Always my first thought...

...accompanied by a happy awe. Additionally:

"One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity."

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious."

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible."

~Albert Einstein

(Okay, so I've been reading Isaacson's bio of the great man. An excellent book, by the way. Einstein's brilliance and science may be way over my head, but his playfully curious, awe-fill spirit is a magnet to me.)

[NOW tense]

2. Was it there before they looked? n/t

[Trajan]

3. Ok .... So there are NOT 'Billions and billions' ?

Sagan is SUCH as liar !

[lostnotforgotten]

4. Your Forgetting The Other Galaxies

eom

[Trajan]

9. And YOU'RE forgetting ...

I was joking with a Carl Sagan riff ....

[ananda]

5. Pic?

Here is what a torus ring of stars looks like.



However, I don't know what this newly discovered band
actually looks like.

[Bill McBlueState]

6. This article's six years old.

That doesn't necessarily make it less interesting, but commenters should know that.

[Swede]

7. Thanks for the heads up.

I found this web surfing this morning.