Milky Way Anatomy

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If we could see our galaxy, the Milky Way, from the outside, it would look like an enormous, bedazzled pinwheel. Vast sprays of stars form spiral arms that curl outward from a bright center that bulges like the yolk in a fried egg. Dark, dusty tendrils darken some regions, while glowing pink gas clouds light up others.

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy, highlighting its main components: the disk, bulge, stellar halo, and dark matter halo. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Alt text: Infographic labeled Milky Way Anatomy. At the left, a face-on galaxy labeled “disk, 100,000 ly across,” has three components labeled: bar, 16,000 ly long, pointing to the bright, oblong core; spiral arms, pointing to the streams of stars that wrap around the core of the galaxy counter-clockwise; and interstellar medium, thin gas, dust, and particles between stars, pointing to a place in between the spiral arms. At the top right, an edge-on view of the galaxy looks like a CD with a ping pong ball in the middle. It’s labeled thin disk, 1,000 ly thick, pointing to the middle of the disk, and thick disk, up to 6,000 ly thick, pointing to an area slightly above the main part of the disk. The brightly glowing center is labeled bulge, contains supermassive black hole and 10 billion stars. Underneath, there are two zoomed out views of the face-on galaxy – one labeled stellar halo, 300,000 ly across has the galaxy surrounded by a faint glow. The other, labeled dark matter halo, 1 million ly across, is more zoomed out and surrounded in a mottled purple glow. Credit: NASAALT

We have a pretty good idea of the Milky Way’s overall structure, but since we’re nestled inside it, fine details are hard to see. Those clouds of gas and dust strewn throughout interstellar space block our view, especially of the far side of the galaxy.  Astronomers have used observations from different telescopes to piece together our galaxy’s anatomy. Let’s scrub up and dive in!

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Today’s sea slug is Godiva quadricolor, commonly known as the four colour Nudibranch, with the…

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Today’s sea slug is Godiva quadricolor, commonly known as the four colour Nudibranch, with the Godiva genus presumably “dedicated to the English legend of Lady Godiva who rode naked through Coventry in order to persuade her husband not to tax the townspeople so heavily; the only person to look at her as she rode by was a man named Tom and Peeping Tom has become a synonym for voyeur (circa 1040-1080).” (https://opistobranquis.info/en/guia/nudibranchia/aeolidioidea/godiva-quadricolor/) Yes, someone seems to have dedicated a sea slug genus to that haha.

Image source: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/113064072