Wednesday, June 04, 2008

The Milky Way Gets a Facelift

Or rather, our understanding of the Milky Way gets a facelift!

This was reported in today's Science's daily news update.

Forget what you thought the Milky Way looked like. The galaxy is far from the simple and elegant spiral-armed structure so often portrayed. New observations, presented today at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri, reveal, among other things, that the Milky Way is missing two of the four spiral arms it was thought to have. The findings should force a significant rethinking about how the Milky Way evolved and how its stars formed.


Horrors! We live in a "deformed" galaxy? :)

Zz.

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