Astronomers pinpoint Milky Way's edge at 40,000 light-years from center

From within the very galaxy they sought to measure, astronomers have traced the Milky Way's edge to approximately 40,000 light-years from its center — not a wall, but a threshold where the conditions for stellar birth quietly expire. A team rooted in the University of Malta mapped the ages of more than 100,000 giant stars, finding in their distribution a story of creation, migration, and gradual silence. This boundary, shaped by the galaxy's own gravitational choreography, places the Milky Way among the majority of its cosmic neighbors — a Type-II disc galaxy whose outer reaches have grown old