Credit: Images: Miguel A. Aragon-Calvo, Simulation Data: Illustris TNG project (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Images: Miguel A. Aragon-Calvo, Simulation Data: Illustris TNG project (CC BY 4.0)

According to the team, it may be necessary to take into account the special environment around the Milky Way when running simulations, to avoid a so-called “Copernican bias” in making scientific inference from the galaxies around us.

This bias, describing the successive removal of our special status in the nearly 500 years since Copernicus demoted the Earth from being at the center of the cosmos, would come from assuming that we reside in a completely average place in the Universe.

If 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.

Reference: “The unusual Milky Way-local sheet system: implications for spin strength and alignment” by M A Aragon-Calvo, Joseph Silk and Mark Neyrinck, 23 December 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.