Our Milky Way Galaxy Is Warped Instead of Flat

By Ryan Whitwam

From everything we’ve been able to tell, the Milky Way is a fairly typical galaxy. It’s a medium-large spiral with several smaller satellite galaxies, and the disk spans some 120,000 light-years. It can be hard to tell what the galaxy looks like from the inside, though. A new analysis focusing on a class of very bright stars indicates the Milky Way might be stranger than we thought with a warped and uneven central disk.

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