Milky Way's Inner Beauty Revealed

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Astronomers Tom Dame and Patrick Thaddeus have found evidence for a far-side counterpart to the expanding 3-kiloparsec spiral arm near the center of the Milky Way. The new arm is a virtual twin to the near arm which was found 50 years ago. The inner ...
Astronomers Tom Dame and Patrick Thaddeus have found evidence for a far-side counterpart to the expanding 3-kiloparsec spiral arm near the center of the Milky Way. The new arm is a virtual twin to the near arm, which was found 50 years ago. The inner Milky Way therefore shows a beautiful symmetry. Credit: Tom Dame (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA)

We live in the Milky Way galaxy - a disk-shaped collection of about 400 billion stars including the Sun. Many of those stars and much of the dense gas between the stars concentrate into large arms that spiral outward from the galactic center.


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