So you’ve lived here all your life — in fact, everyone has — but what do you really know about the Milky Way galaxy? Sure, you know it’s a spiral, and its 100,000 light years across.
So let’s see if these really are Ten Things You don’t know about the Milky Way Galaxy.
1) Its a barred spiral.
You might know that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, perhaps the most beautiful galaxy type. But you can know lot about them. They have a majestic arms sweeping out from a central hub or bulge of glowing stars. A lot of spirals have a weird feature: a rectangular block of stars at the center instead of a sphere, and the arms radiate away from the ends of the block. Astronomers call this block a bar, and, we have one.
In fact, ours is pretty big. At 27,000 light years end-to-end, it’s beefier than most bars. Of course, space is a rough neighborhood.