spiral arms
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The Milky Way Demystified
Alright, people…time to finish off our exploration of the Milky Way Galaxy, our home in the cosmos! For the past nine weeks, we’ve covered everything from how our galaxy was “discovered” to how it may have formed. But there’s so…
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The Composition of the Milky Way
What is our home galaxy made up of? In the broadest sense, it’s made up of stars, clouds of dust and gas, and the mysterious dark matter. We could also get a little more detailed. We could say that it…
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What Are Spiral Arms?
Probably the most spectacular feature of our Milky Way galaxy is its spiral arms. We can’t get a probe far enough out yet to take a galactic selfie, but astronomers are reasonably sure that we live in a spiral galaxy.…
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Exploring the Milky Way’s Spiral Arms
The Milky Way — our home galaxy — is a spiral galaxy, a classification I often describe as pinwheel-shaped. The main difference between a spiral galaxy’s shape and a pinwheel’s shape is that spiral galaxies, like the Milky Way, only…
