Picture of Our Galaxy: How We Captured It

[russ_watters]

You can see the milky way in this picture (huge) its a 360 panorama:
http://www.nps.gov/labe/parknews/images/Nightsky_from_Beds_2_KFalls_moonrising_milkyway.jpg

Wow, I've never seen it represented that way. Very cool.

 

[turbo]

From internal surveys, we now believe that the MW is a barred spiral with a prominent bar and a modest/average central bulge. We know that other barred spirals are not always symmetrical WRT to the number of arms or their arrangements. In addition, spirals are often interacting with neighbors, and we can't be sure that we don't have such a companion (like M51 does) on the other side of the galaxy, especially since signs of interaction such as enhanced star formation have high-frequency spectra that are easily attenuated by intervening gas and dust.

 

[DaveC426913]

... especially since signs of interaction such as enhanced star formation have high-frequency spectra that are easily attenuated by intervening gas and dust.

And especially since evidence suggests that MW has recently torn apart and absorbed another galaxy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/space/10galaxy.html
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/happenings/20070530/

 

[turbo]

I was actually going to use that! Seriously.

This site is a science education site and if we just answer the question, all you've gained is a single factoid that you may or may not remember in a month. It hasn't really helped much. But if instead you go back and pay a little bit more attention to what you were looking at, form a more coherent question, etc., and answer it for yourself, you'll learn something far more valuable: you'll learn how to learn.

I went to a neighbor's place today to borrow his old grader (suitable for the 3-point hitch on my Kubota). When I came back up out of the woods, my other neighbor (who often uses the other other guy's very large tractor-backhoe, etc) said "Why didn't you stop in so I could help you?" My reply was that I wanted to learn how to do it right. He would have made the hook-up easy, and I might not have understood WHY. Now I know that if you're going to back a tractor up to an implement, you should line up with the lowest hitch-pin first, raise the 3-pt to line up the upper active pin, then adjust so that you can hitch the passive upper link. It took me about 30 minutes to find out for myself what I could have wasted years to understand with only intermittent usage of that implement with skilled operators telling what to do. Sometimes you really have to be in the trenches.

 

[Chronos]

Actually, the MW is currently believed to be a barred spiral, so the picture is unrepresentative. See http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer-20080603-10am.html

 

[fawk3s]

We have barely gotten probes out of our solar system. I sure would like to meet the folks that have imaged the MW from outside the galaxy. They'd be real old, though and might be cranky - best not to tick them off.

mby they had cosmic strings..