{"id":253,"date":"2009-04-13T16:05:19","date_gmt":"2009-04-13T23:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=253"},"modified":"2009-04-13T22:53:31","modified_gmt":"2009-04-14T05:53:31","slug":"the-milky-way-is-a-barred-spiral-galaxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=253","title":{"rendered":"The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:236084main_MilkyWay-full-annotated.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=floatRight src=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/8\/89\/236084main_MilkyWay-full-annotated.jpg\/180px-236084main_MilkyWay-full-annotated.jpg\"><\/a>We all grew up being told that the Milky Way was a spiral galaxy, twisting beautiful starry arms through inky space like our photogenic neighbor <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Andromeda_Galaxy\">Andromeda<\/a>.  So it may have come as a surprise to you, as it did to me, to learn that in 2005 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/dn7854--bar-at-milky-ways-heart-revealed.html\">the Spitzer Space Telescope confirmed<\/a> that in fact we live in a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Barred_spiral_galaxy\">barred spiral galaxy<\/a> instead.  This isn&#8217;t that strange; apparently <a href=\"http:\/\/adsabs.harvard.edu\/abs\/1999Ap&#038;SS.269..427E\">up to two-thirds of all spiral galaxies contain a bar<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Even more interesting, our galaxy has four arms (in our current understanding of its structure) and they have each been named.  We reside in the Orion arm, a small offshoot between the Carina-Sagittarius and Perseus arms.  The main two other arms are Scutum-Crux and Norma.<\/p>\n<p>As a side note, the wikipedia page on barred spiral galaxies includes this rather unfortunate statement:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;Studying the core of the Milky Way, scientists found out that the Milky Way&#8217;s bulge was peanut-shaped. This led to the conclusion that all barred spiral galaxies have a peanut shaped bulge.&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m guessing that more was involved than simply generalizing from a single example.<\/p>\n<p>Also fun is this list of <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/badastronomy\/2008\/03\/12\/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-the-milky-way-galaxy\/\">Ten Things You Don&#8217;t Know about the Milky Way Galaxy<\/a>.  I was pleased to discover that I knew all but #8 and #9 &#8212; and also pleased that there were two new things to learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We all grew up being told that the Milky Way was a spiral galaxy, twisting beautiful starry arms through inky space like our photogenic neighbor Andromeda. So it may have come as a surprise to you, as it did to me, to learn that in 2005 the Spitzer Space Telescope confirmed that in fact we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":266,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions\/266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}