New Images: Milky Way Loses Two Arms

ST. LOUIS — For decades, astronomers have pictured our galaxy as sporting four major, spiral arms, however new images effectively sever two appendages, revealing the Milky Way has just two major arms.

www.livescience.com...

Well, that's pretty interesting.

I always thought we couldn't see our own galaxy and we just sort of assumed it's shape based on obsdervations of other galaxys?

A little confused, that's all.

there is no possible way to have a fully functioning model or even a glimpse of the milky way, because - drumroll please - we are IN the milky way.

only speculation and theory is on the table on this point.

one of the things that i have the least doubt about.

Good point, how exactly can we see our galaxy, or is it only speculation???

I think they use physics and math to find out an estimate(:

Like he said we're in the middle of milky way so there is no way to know exactly what it looks like.

I suppose we could view other galaxies, and just try to picture what our own would look like.

Originally posted by Grock
there is no possible way to have a fully functioning model or even a glimpse of the milky way, because - drumroll please - we are IN the milky way.

only speculation and theory is on the table on this point.

one of the things that i have the least doubt about.

Actually, there's a bit more than speculation and theory on the table...

The new survey of an extensive swath of the Milky Way was done with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which detects infrared light. All objects that emit any heat can be seen in infrared, and this wavelength penetrates dust, so the new mosaic includes 800,000 snapshots and more than 110 million stars.

That's from the link in the OP...down near the bottom of the article.

So you see, we can "see"' our milky way from within, it's just not as pretty of a picture as the artiststic rendering, at first, and it takes a long time to interpret the observations.
As technology improves our ability to see into space around us, and as long as people are "looking", the picture will continue to evolve, and therefore become more accurate.

I wouldn't be surprised if in say 50 or so years, we find that it looks nothing like we ever imagined.

They can estimate what our galaxy looks like, by extrapolating information on the distances of stars as well as using infrared images as tjack pointed out. They can tell that stars that are roughly the same distance away would be in the same spiral arm and draw a map based on that.

Very interesting stuff. Maybe one day, we will be able to go out far enough to see if they were right.

reply to post by Hal9000


wow, its so exciting to think that one day we might be able to go out in to the depths of space and see our galexy from way out there.

But yea...... that day wont come for a long time.

-fm

Eventually it would be possible, but not in our lifetime i dont think.